30 Days Out: Part II (FL to CA)

30 Days Out: The Story of How I Got Here

Part II, Florida to California

Okay, welcome back. If you missed Part I, the quick version is this. I went from a girl at UGA with zero clue what she was doing in the gym to someone who got completely obsessed with CrossFit, and then I packed up my life and moved to Florida for a job at Disney.

And that's where we left off. New job, new state, fresh start, and me feeling weirdly lost in the middle of all of it.

So let's keep going.

Initally, Florida was not the dream I thought it'd be.

I was working at Disney in horticulture and pretty quickly I realized it just wasn't doing it for me. I knew it wasn't the thing. I just had no idea what the thing actually was. So I was kind of stuck in that limbo of "this isn't right" without knowing what right even looked like. Real scary place to be, I tell ya. 

Fitness wasn't much better honestly. I kept trying to find a CrossFit gym I loved like the one back in Georgia, and I just never really clicked with one. So I was floating there too.

Eventually I quit Disney. Did a few random odd jobs. And then I landed a sales job at a local fitness equipment retailer.

I had no idea at the time, but that job was about to change everything.

This is where powerlifting found me.

Being around fitness equipment all day kind of reignited something. I stepped away from CrossFit and started dabbling in powerlifting instead.

And for the first time in a while, I fell into a real routine. Practice every Monday, Wednesday, Friday. And the results came fast. My lifts kept climbing, I was getting noticeably stronger, I was seeing more definition than I ever had. It felt good to have a thing again.

My coach and I decided I was ready to compete, so we signed me up for a meet.

And then, two weeks out, the comp got cancelled.

Here's the honest part though. I wasn't devastated. I wasn't even really that upset. I was kind of just... eh about it.

And looking back now, that "eh" tells me everything. If powerlifting had been my thing, that cancellation would've wrecked me. It didn't. Because that was never where I was supposed to land. That was just God quietly closing a door I wasn't even fighting to keep open.

So I let it go.

I gave up powerlifting and started going to a local bodybuilding gym instead. And once again, I didn't really know what I was doing. But I was there. I was trying. I was figuring it out one session at a time.

And then, you know what came next.

COVID.

Working at a fitness equipment store during a pandemic was a whole thing.

It was exactly as chaotic as you'd imagine. Orders were flying in, we were selling out of everything, everyone on the planet was suddenly building a home gym out of whatever they could get their hands on. 

And meanwhile, personally? I felt lost again. I'd just found this new direction in fitness, and then the ability to even go to the gym got taken away. I grabbed a few bands, some dumbbells, a couple kettlebells, and I kept going. But it wasn't the same and I knew it.

I was unsettled. In my fitness, in my job, in Florida, in kind of everything.

And then I did something a little crazy.

I wanted something different. I had no real plan, I just knew I was ready for a new chapter and a little adventure. So I started applying to jobs all over the west coast, just throwing my name out there to see what stuck.

Then one day I got a call from a company out in the LA area of California. They wanted me. Right away.

So I did the only thing that felt right in the moment.

I loaded up my car, my dog, my life, and I drove straight to California. I set out on a road trip to move to a completely new state on a completely new coast, knowing absolutely no one and somehow, it still felt right even though I had absolutely no idea what I was walking into.

But that's a story for next Wednesday. Part III, California back to Florida, and this is where things really start to come together.

Just finding the series? Start with Part I on the blog. New part every Wednesday until the launch.