How an accident turned me into an activist (and now, an entrepreneur)
Hi, readers. It’s been a few weeks since my last post but I am back…well, at least until I start my maternity leave in a few weeks’ time! 👶🏻
At the point in my journey that I described in my last post, I’ll be honest with you — things were really going my way! I had a refined business idea. I was participating in incubators and talking with real-life investors. My dream of starting a business was starting to feel increasingly possible.
It is super important to note, however, that things most certainly do not always work out the way I want them to. My life, like everyone’s, is dotted with some rather challenging twists and turns that have gotten me to where I am today. It is the culmination of these experiences — the good, the bad, and the ugly — that ultimately gave me the courage to take a leap of faith and start my own business.
In this post, I want to talk about one of these experiences in particular that shaped me into the person and founder I am today.
ROCK BOTTOM, PART 1
In my first blog post, I shared the feeling of hitting rock bottom during the pandemic is what sparked something within me to create Mayven. However, this was not the first time in my life that everything was falling apart.
On the night of Tuesday, September 23rd, 2014, I woke up in a hospital bed with my hands restrained, a brace around my neck, and a breathing tube down my throat. The doctor looking after me carefully removed my breathing tube and looked me in the eyes. “Megan, do you know how you got here?” he asked. Still trying to figure out if this was reality or a bad nightmare, I managed to shake my head. “You’ve been in a very bad accident,” the doctor explained. “A cyclist hit you while you were running. You fell back and hit your head, causing a fracture in your skull and bleeding in your brain.” This is not a nightmare, I realized. The panic set in.
As if that wasn’t already horrific enough, the news was later broken to me that most people suffering from brain injuries never make a full recovery. Despite trying to go back to work, many struggle with unemployment due to changes in their cognitive faculties. At 27 years old, I felt as if someone had just snatched everything away from me. My life as I had known it, one with such a promising foundation, was now in jeopardy.
The irony in all this is, I wasn’t even a huge runner (more of a casual jogger at best). What brought me to the Chicago Lakefront Trail that fateful day was a decision I had recently made to check off one of my bucket list items: run a marathon. At this point in my life, I had achieved my early professional goals — graduate from college, become a CPA, launch my career at a Big Four accounting firm. I felt like it was time to tackle some of my personal goals. Living in the “Windy City”, I had heard wonderful things about the Chicago Marathon. It’s a flat course with good weather and millions of spectators. A friend and I decided that we’d sign up together and run to raise money for the Muscular Dystrophy Association.
After signing up, I religiously followed a 16-week training program which helped me prepare for the daunting thought of running 26.2 miles. While I enjoyed training, it was GRUELING, especially the double-digit runs. At times, the only thing that allowed me to push through the pain was the thought of crossing the finish line on race day. Two weeks before the marathon, I embarked on a four-mile run on the Chicago Lakefront Trail — a go-to for many of my runs. It was halfway through this run that everything went black and I found myself in the hospital. Something I had worked SO hard for was ripped away from me in a matter of seconds. I was beyond devastated.
WHEN ONE DOOR CLOSES…
After spending a couple of nights in the hospital, I was discharged and placed on short-term disability for a month. Recovering from an accident while being unable to work and limited to what I could do throughout the day gave me a lot of time to think. I went through waves of anger, sadness, and frustration at having worked so hard only for this mess to be the result. I prayed I would be lucky enough to return to my “normal life” without any long-term cognitive damage. I couldn’t believe how a split-second encounter with a complete stranger had turned my life upside down.
I came to the conclusion that I needed something to help me heal and carry me through this rough patch. I didn’t know it then, but what happened next would be my first brush with activism — and would prepare me for the day I decided to become an entrepreneur full time eight years later. Reflecting on how I had wound up in my current state, it was clear that the Chicago Lakefront Trail was congested with runners, walkers, and cyclists. Something had to be done to make it safer so no one else would have to go through what I was experiencing ever again.
Feeling energized for the first time since the accident, I began brainstorming how to change the trail for the better. As it turned out, the chaotic state of the lakefront had been a known problem and a ticking time bomb for over 20 years that I was lucky enough to detonate. But for this, that, and the other reason, nothing had changed. I knew I was going to need a partner that was well-versed in this space and passionate about sparking change. I found that partner in Chicago non-profit group Active Transportation Alliance, whose mission is “to advocate for walking, bicycling, and public transit to create healthy, sustainable, and equitable communities”. As soon as I was back on my feet, the Active Transportation Alliance and I got to work.
BRING IT ON, NAYSAYERS
Something you should know about me is that the more someone tells me “no”, the harder I’m going to work to get what I want. When I first told my husband (then my boyfriend) that I was going to campaign to change the Lakefront Trail, he told me I was never going to get through to the local government (a reflection of his lack of faith in them rather than in me). What the local government didn’t know was that I could have been killed from this ordeal — so I wasn’t going to take “no” for an answer.
With Active Transportation’s support, I articulated my vision to create a safer lakefront by separating the path into two parts: one for bikers and one for pedestrians. This concept was the norm on many paths and trails in Minneapolis where I had lived for a couple of years after graduating from college. Active Transportation and I teamed up in a campaign to promote this separation, leveraging my accident to create a sense of urgency for the city to act. Our critics argued there was not enough space on the path to divide it up — and that even if there was, the city surely had more important problems to invest in. So, I dug in my heels and pushed harder.
Over the next several months, the Active Transportation Alliance and I continued to put pressure on this issue. I raised awareness of our campaign at press conferences and on camera with media outlets, something my training as an accountant did not prepare me for! I even had the chance to speak with the then Mayor of Chicago, Rahm Emmanuel. A father, I emphatically made the case to Mayor Emmanuel that no parent should ever have to go through what my parents went through when they found out I had been in such a serious accident.
Thankfully, all our hard work started to pay off. About a year into the campaign, the city agreed to start the separation of the path on selected stretches. We celebrated this leap forward, but knew we needed to continue the momentum in order to get the entire path divided. Active Transportation and I continued our advocacy, me in my spare time as I was back to work full-time miraculously with no cognitive challenges.
A few days before Christmas 2016 and a little more than two years after my accident, the gift we had all been waiting for finally arrived. Ken Griffin, CEO and founder of Citadel (and Illinois’ wealthiest individual), pledged to donate the remaining 12 million dollars needed to complete the separation of the ENTIRE path. To this day, I am deeply grateful to both the Mayor and Mr. Griffin for their support and generosity. We hustled hard and got what we wanted.
TAKEAWAYS
I feel so lucky to be sitting here today, writing this post with my husband and daughter in the background and my second baby on the way. I made a full recovery from the accident and decided not to let it stop me from achieving my bucket list item of running a marathon. In 2015, after another grueling summer of training, I signed up once again for the Chicago Marathon. I even ran a handful of my training runs on newly separated stretches of the lakefront path, to my great relief and delight. Crossing a finish line never felt so good.
To end this post, I want to share a few key things this experience taught me:
- Innovation isn’t always complex or new. Sometimes, it is applying existing solutions in a new place. For me, it was bringing what worked in Minneapolis to Chicago.
- Doubters, haters, skeptics and trolls are inevitable when you are pushing for change. What some may see as a silly little dream can turn into a reality. Follow your intuition and keep pushing until you win.
- One of the best ways to gain a new skill is by diving in. I learned to successfully navigate public speaking (in local politics nonetheless!) with zero experience by jumping in. Today, I am all the more confident for it.
- Patience pays off. It took almost two years from my initial meeting with Active Transportation Alliance for Chicago to commit to separating the whole path. And this success was based on 20 years of lobbying for change before that. We all love instant gratification but good things often take time.
- Always know your “why” message and be able to articulate it to stakeholders. It took reframing the Active Transportation Alliance’s messaging with a human story (my accident) to resonate with people and drive change.
