In 2020 I lost my business and my identity and, in that moment, I became free.
Most people spend their 27th birthday surrounded by friends, drinking the night away in plush, low-lit lounge, sparklers fizzling from a cake.
I spent mine in the darkness of my cheap-timber pannelled sub-let flat nursing a migraine from hell.
Building a physical business (mine tourism) in one city whilst working full-time as an employee in another wasn’t as farfetchd as it may seem today.
In fact it was kind of de rigeur in 2019.
Gary V hadn’t yet been cancelled for pushing hustle culture to the the extreme and self-love was still a marginal and esoteric concept that hadn’t found yet found its audience in the anxiety-ridden, panic-stricken landscape of lockdown 1.0.
In my day job I would shift cases of wine from the back of truck into a warehouse and stack the cases fifteen high like 3-D Tetris columns.
In my own business I’d wine (and often dine) visitors who came to London for a few days, telling them stories about the history Claret and Burgundy and keeping their glasses topped up along the way.
Like sleazy corporate hospitality but with all eyes on the off-balance and scantily-clad Chateau Margaux gyrating at you all the way from 1989.
Who knew wine tourism was a thing in a country with 200 days of rain a year…
The problem with doing something you love- every day of the year- is that you stop loving it pretty quickly.
A mentor of mine put it better than I ever could when describing their own lockdown hell:
I was in Thailand with a beautiful woman and I thought to myself “Hey, you could be stuck here in paradise with this girl for months? …But maybe I don’t want to be stuck in paradise with this girl for months….”
On top of that, the problem with overworking yourself seven days a week, whether physically or mentally is that you burnout sooner or later.
So there I was, mopping my brow and breathing deeply, trying to keep the mid-August afternoon light out of my room as my friends who had gathered to celebrate the day with me sent me pictures from the bar.
At that point I realised that perhaps I should have focus grouped the sustainability of my business model before launching into it head-first.
The problem was that I was ‘the wine guy’.
I had been since university and people expected it of me; or at least I thought they did…
Whenever two people meet, there are really six people present. There is each man as he sees himself, each man as the other person sees him, and each man as he really is. — William James
It was a cage of my own making — constant messaging on social media led me to believe that in order to be successful you had to be the go-to guy or girl on any given area of expertise.
Being curious or ‘partial’ to something was for half-hearted hobbyists and slackers.
Success in any field was about going all in and committing yourself wholeheartedly to that identity.
In most cases there is nothing wrong with this.
If, however, you overreach on what you think you can achieve in a specific period of time you burn the candle at both ends and start to get jaded real quickly.
March 17th 2020
In one of my favourite films, It’s a wonderful life, the dependable George Bailey is a community man who gives too much, and asks for little in return.
Just as he’s leaving for his honeymoon, the skies open and a mass of people run across his car, heading for the bank of which he sits on the board of directors.
It’s the 1929 Wall Street Crash and there’s a run on the bank.
If you’ve ever seen footage of a wall street trading floor during an economic crash you’ll know that knot in your stomach sensation of watching unavoidable catastrophe unfold and the hopelessness that comes with it.
As the citizens of the fictional Bedford Falls fight past each other to withdraw what savings they have left from the bank, George’s only hope to prevent the bank foreclosing by the end of the day is to pay out to all the customers using the money he had saved for his honeymoon.
I could never claim to be as magnanimous as the lovable socialist played by James Stewart (coincidentally the film was investigated by the FBI at the height of the McCarthism communist witch-hunt) but….
Over the course of a typically drizzly London day in March I watched as a calendar years worth of bookings were slowly disappeared from my diary as refunds were issued and the my planner became a lot less busy.
The five stages of grief are well documented:
- Denial
- Anger
- Bargaining
- Depression
- Acceptance
There was little to bargain with in my instance but I more than made up for it with anger and though I’m (fortunately) not prone to depression I did slip into a malaise as I begrudgingly picked up odd-jobs here and there to keep my balance from going into the red.
Wrestling with the identity of a person who is not doing what they feel they should be doing is one of the greats ills in society an the currency that we give to our assumed identities is one of the most agency-depleting and energy-sapping injustices we can do to ourselves. But everything comes to a head…
Once the smoke had settled. I regained my health; I stopped drinking for a few months, I slept better, I got excited about all the other things that I used to do but which I had not had the time for till then.
I disappeared for some time and unplugged from the world and when there’s no one watching you, you soon learn that there’s no one in particular that you have to be.
One day it clicked!
The only thing that had ever held me back was my ego and a lingering perception of who I used to be.
In this moment I understood that I had regained my agency.
And I envy you. You have the one thing that matters. You have all your discoveries before you.
John Fowles, The Magus
When you have nothing, you have nothing to lose and so you start all over again. All that remains is the weightless burden of your lived experience, that you may interpret however you choose.
In front of you however, there is but a blank notepad on which to lay bear your discoveries and a magnifier to interpret who it is that you really are.
Be careful which lens you choose.
Freddie Kift — I write about language learning, communication, flow states and working remotely.
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