The Enduring Importance of Self Care:
What Drives The Things That Drive You
(aka Reflecting On My Big Brad Pitt Year)
Need To Know:
- This isn’t a story about company culture, or business strategy, or the startup secrets I’ve learned in year one as a co-founder.
- This is a story about how my relationship with myself led me to help create Spright and what we are here to accomplish.
- This is a little touchy-feely. Sorry ‘bout it. Next time I’ll bring more of a sense of humor…
Self Care and Showers
I recently found myself a couple glasses of wine deep giving life advice to a one-year-old. It was at the end of her birthday party and she was nodding off in the car seat as her parents gave me a ride home. It had been a long day outside and girlfriend had cupcake from head to toe. I told her this: always shower (or in her case, get a bath) after an epic day before getting into bed. No matter how tempting bed may be, I explained, you’ll be happy to wake up clean and without having to immediately wash your sheets.
It was solid advice and I stand by it, but what I was really trying to remind this baby — and maybe myself — is the importance of self care. A shower before bed is just a step to keeping clean, but knowing how to be mindful about yourself, your actions, and your body is one of life’s biggest lessons. Coming to fully understand self care has taken me just about all of my nearly 33 years, and within those, 2015 has been a turning point for me.
Over the past year, many people have asked me what was behind My Big Life Change: Why I left a job and company I loved to start something new. What is my goal with my new company and why is Spright different? As a co-founder, I’ve given a lot of answers, but none of them have been 100% honest. So here we go.
I need to build a space for women and men to feel comfortable learning, communicating, experimenting, and ultimately finding the things that make them feel their best. For some, this means weight loss. For others, motivation to exercise. For more, it’s putting together a full, personalized picture of health (we call them tangrams). For health professionals, it’s finding a way to excel, connect, and teach. For me, it hasn’t existed. So I’m building it because I needed it before, I need it now, and I am not alone.
The Back Story (Well, Some of It) On The Eve of 33
I would say it as a joke: in middle school, I was infatuated with Brad Pitt. It was back when he and Gwyneth Paltrow were a golden couple. I was 13. He was 32. Brad Pitt seemed to have it all, so little Molly knew, 32 year olds have their shit together.
The truth is, I was also incredibly sad at that age. I had a tumultuous home life. I was a bit overweight and underdeveloped, and I was convinced I would never be pretty or cool or any of the things that 12 and 13 year olds (and let’s be honest, 20 and 30 year olds) hold to the highest esteem. I spent a lot of time crying about it while planning my glorious adult future, as so many young, unhappy kids do. Outwardly, I coped by shutting down and compartmentalizing my emotions far away. Through high school, college, and beyond, that translated into some regrettable, destructive decisions.
My Brad Pitt story is well known among my friends, so a year ago they threw me a Brad Pitt themed 32nd birthday party. I smiled and posed with the Brad Pitt cake and cardboard cutout. What would 32 actually mean?
Four months later, I left the company that had been my identity for eight years, the entirety of my time in San Francisco. It cracked my heart open to an extent that might be considered humiliating to admit about a job (it was so much more than just a job). Once again I found myself in tears every day for months, something I hasn’t experienced since I was that middle-schooler. I had panic attacks. I would sit in the bathroom stall at work asking myself what the hell I was thinking. It was my Brad Pitt Year — I was supposed to have it figured out! — but this was an inauspicious start.
January 5, I walked into the new life. I was terrified and full of self-doubt. Deep down, however, I knew it’s what I needed to do to finally heal myself.
It was day one of Spright.
The Rest of the Back Story (The Harder Bit)
This is the hard part to write. Partly because I’m ashamed, partly because I don’t think I’m special, and partly because it doesn’t define me. Having an eating disorder for much of my adult life is only one part of my tangram. It doesn’t make me unique, but it’s part of what makes me. Recovery didn’t come from therapy or working with a nutritionist, though I tried that. It also didn’t come out of confrontations and conversations with loved ones, though I had those too.
I’d like to say that recovery came when I felt strong enough, but I found my way when I was my weakest. I was beaten down from abusing myself. This is a much longer story for another time (I’ll tell it if you want to hear it), but in a lot of ways it was desperation, not strength, that pulled me up. It can be that way, but it doesn’t have to be. I don’t have answers; I do have ideas.
I’ve written and rewritten this piece, wondering if any critics will say that this part of my history is why I should NOT be at the helm of a healthy living company. I’d like to think that my experiences make me uniquely qualified. So, sure:
- I’ve helped lead a big editorial team, made strategies and calendars, managed editors, written countless stories, and built sizable audiences more than once.
- I’ve run marathons, done thousands of hours of yoga, attended every class under the sun, tried triathloning, and tested out CrossFit.
- I’ve read, watched, downloaded, tested, and listened to everything I can get my hands about health — and that’s health broadly, not just exercise or diet.
- I’ve thrived on human friendships and think they are at the core of any personal decision.
- I’ve also gained and lost weight through many means (only some of which I would recommend), heard comments the whole way through, and lived to tell about it.
- I’ve learned things throughout my process that have been useful for others. I’ve cheered on and shared experiences with friends.
All those things are true, but here’s what I also know: having been at the bottom with a destructive pattern, I have ideas about what needs to exist to help people like me fight their way up. There needs to be a place where struggles are understood and successes are celebrated, where someone will be there to make sure you take care of yourself with the proverbial pre-bed shower.
Spright can help people, whatever their goals are, by being human and letting them be human too.
What Spright Is Trying To Change
Fitness media can be as troubling as fashion. Strong is considered sexy if it also comes with well defined muscles and a minuscule body fat percentage. Knowing what I need for self-preservation, I avoid reading beyond many of the headlines. Pinterest, Instagram, Facebook — these places can be land mines for the thousands of women and men who are battling with their bodies. I know that because I am one of them.
That kind of media is addictive, and making more of it would be easy (and dare I say clickable), but this isn’t a space that needs ‘easy.’ If creating an environment that celebrates all of us as works-in-progress is the harder path for our editorial strategy, so be it.
My current inner peace (if you’ll let me have that wording) hasn’t come easily and this is something that infuses everything we do at Spright. The years that I had held my own eating disorder in denial will always be with me. I felt like a fraud — preaching self love and self confidence, but feeling private embarrassment — and that shaped me. But finding a way to quiet those demons is formative, too. So part of My Big Life Change was finding a way to help other people change their own stories.
Making decisions about your own body can be incredibly intimidating. What else could be scarier, both to try and to share with the world? You need support to come from within and outside yourself. You can’t do it without self-care, but it’s also so hard to do alone.
At Spright, we’ve gathered a group of people who share this vision: We want to make health less isolating. And always include a solid dose of fun — none of this works without that.
Right now, Spright’s voice is getting louder. This means a unique way of doing product reviews, an editorial standard around what the word “healthy” should actually mean, expert contributors who believe in the importance of personal paths, a perspective that takes into account all of the factors that affect our food and movement decisions, and a growing community supporting each other in small group programs.
We need to dig deeper and tell the stories that bring us together. We are connecting people with the systems that will work, which means offering a variety of ways to find your tangram. It may be private, it may be public, it may change day to day based on how you feel. That’s expected and necessary.
I won’t speak for my wonderful co-founders or our Spright family, but I might not be here if this was all easy for me. I’m motivated by my own experience and desire to create something that maybe could have — and likely still will — help me. In the next few months this will mean many new features on the site, maybe a mobile app, definitely a lot of love and passion from this team.
It is hard and it is messy to share these stories, but it is essentially human to see the twists and turns our paths take.
We understand relationships with food and fitness may touch issues far deeper than they first appear. What builds you up one day can tear you down the next. We embrace the journey, even when it’s hard. We celebrate strength — or what may feel like lack thereof — of all shapes and sizes, especially yours.
What Now?
There were many moments when I knew my perspective was changing, but here’s one. At the end of a yoga class our teacher told us to hug our knees into our chest. Without thinking, I found myself kissing each of my knees and thanking my legs for keeping me strong. My legs have kept me moving forward and held me up through thousands of miles of running, biking, and swimming. They deserve that thanks. Each of our bodies do. You only get one and it’s so strong and precious.
Some of this might change the way that people look at me, but I’ve known I wanted to write it since I started this company. I also have a luxury that most people do not: I get to work with a one of a kind, enthusiastic, inspiring team to dictate our healthy living narrative and broadcast it to the world. We’re giving it everything we’ve got to spread our vision wide.
I turn 33 this weekend. My Brad Pitt Year is almost over, but this story is far from done. Self care is going to stay top of mind, and I’m definitely going to need these strong legs.
Come find us at Spright, get in the conversation, sign up for my newsletter, and join one of our group programs. Health looks different for everyone, so let’s help figure it out with you. Bring your friends to create something together. Or just say hi @mollygoodson and remind me to shower the cupcake off my face before I go to bed.
