$0 in Savings, No Plan, No Place to Live - and It Changed My ENTIRE Life

Did you notice I went quiet? No episodes, no social media, no showing up. Life got heavy in a way I wasn't expecting, and honestly… I needed a minute.

This episode is part nostalgia, part grief, and part reminder that the scariest leaps are always the ones worth taking.

In This Episode:

• Why I’ve been grieving the past few days, and the pit in my stomach I felt when I was at TEDx
• The weird butterfly effect of leaving home and accidentally building an entirely different life
• Losing my dog unexpectedly, and the spiral of thinking about alternate timelines and “what if” moments
• The moment my car’s alternator failed on a busy California freeway - and why we almost gave up

Let's Connect:

Follow me on Instagram: @alisonkinsey or send me an email: alison@alisonkinsey.com. 

Connect with Alison on LinkedIn.

I also help entrepreneurs and thought leaders launch and grow their podcasts through my boutique podcast editing agency, Podcasting for Creatives. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Have you ever thought about that? Like, if you made a different decision, your life could have turned out completely, utterly, wildly different, for better or worse. Every single choice, every decision we make, even like the more complex, the bigger, the crazier, the riskier decisions, those are often the ones that have the capacity to change who we are at our core. I'm Alison, nine months into my career break from tech, and four days ago, you would have found me at my local TEDx event, listening to all kinds of inspiring speakers take the stage. And one of them was none other than my friend Bridget Shannon, such an inspiring example of a woman who carved out her own path. She used to be an intuitive eating coach. And then during the pandemic, she started to fall head over heels with the therapeutic benefits of planting and growing flowers. So starting with that seed, harvesting that beautiful plant. There was something about that process that was just so delightful to her as a way to reconnect with nature and her own creativity. Now she runs a full-on, fresh-cut flower farm with her husband Robbie and a team of farmers and floral designers, and they grow zinnias, Cosmos, dahlias, sweet peas, tulips, so many different beautiful blooms. And I remember meeting up with Bridget shortly after she launched this new business, which she had decided to call it nowadays flowers. And I could just tell she had this passion and fire in her that I had never seen before. It was a different kind of spark. And I'm going to keep sharing stories like this because I find it so freaking awesome when somebody pivots like that and now they're doing something they really love. Here she is now commanding a stage, a TEDx stage of all stages. And she gets to speak in front of 1,000 people about it. So as I was putting this episode together, I realized there are a couple of core themes that are going to come out, but there's a thread that connects all of it. I would say the crux of it is going to be about the bold, wild, and audacious decisions we can make that can completely shift our identity and our lives. And this is something I've been thinking about a lot lately. This idea of choosing a more interesting life. And how can I and how can you bring more and more of the interesting into your everyday life? Back to Bridget, while I was cheering her on and watching all the other speakers that morning, I also just had this deep pit in my stomach. So much anxiety because I knew just hours later we were going to be saying goodbye to our 14 and a half year old dog Chaz. It's a marvel that I can even talk about this without breaking down into tears because it's so fresh. We said goodbye to him on Friday. It's now Tuesday. But my dog Chaz, he was a Jack Russell Chihuahua mix, completely off the wall dog who would go berserk if you so much as stepped foot in our house or even within a few feet of him on a walk. He was totally mad, totally aggressive, but he was also such a love and so, so loyal. He followed Steve around the house everywhere. And every night, this was his routine, he climbed on top of Steve's chest, laid down, and licked his face for minutes on end. He was just super routine driven. And he would wake up in all hours of the night sometimes just to like get some water or go outside. He was definitely a little high maintenance. But in 2023, which is actually the same year that Steve ended up in the ER, Chaz started growing a cancerous tumor under his chin, kind of in his jaw area. And we took him right away to an oncology vet. And the vet was like, if you don't do anything and you just let him live out his days, he'll probably have two to four months. So naturally, we were totally devastated thinking that that was going to be our last summer with Chaz. That was it. And that two to four month prognosis turned into three years. And I am just so grateful for that that we had all of that time of him basically just fighting every day. And his demeanor got a lot more mellow, his clinginess completely 10x. I mean, I would always tell Steve, like Chaz is being a stage five clinger. He's being insane. He was such a little love, and it was devastating to let him go. Just such a sad day. It's been a really tough few days. And this is the first time that I've ever lost a pet that's been my pet, not like a family pet. And I've been more emotional and grieved more heavily than I thought I would, especially in the first 24 hours. I remember waking up the next morning and just cried for a straight hour. I just couldn't control my tears. And now it's just this weird, eerie feeling that he's gone. Like he's not here. I think about him a lot. And I wish I could have even just five more minutes with him to hold him, to see his face. But I can't. So it's sad. And I just wanted to like hold space for that in this episode because this is the diary of my career break. It's the raw and vulnerable moments, too. It's the things that I don't necessarily want to talk about. When we first fostered Chaz and his brother Mac, I was thinking about this the other day. Our life looked completely different, completely unrecognizable from the life we have now. I was living in a 594 square foot apartment in an urban part of San Diego, and we were sleeping on an air mattress. I was working random freelance jobs, and Steve was being paid minimum wage at the time he was working at a local guitar center. We were basically broke, living paycheck to paycheck, but I had the nerve to leave my hometown in New Hampshire and try on a different life. It was my dream to do that. And I think about that a lot. What if I had just stayed in my hometown and never left New Hampshire? So many things would never have happened the way they happened. And I'm curious, have you ever thought about that? Like if you made a different decision, your life could have turned out completely, utterly, wildly different, for better or worse. If I never left New Hampshire, I know for certain I would never have met certain people who I now consider close friends. Certain opportunities that I had would never have happened. In 2017, I spoke a little bit about this job in episode one. I got to work for a super successful course creator for close to two years. And the only way I got that job was partly because I was close enough to LA and I could drive to her home in Venice every week because she wanted somebody that could be more of a hybrid employee. We also never would have had the opportunity to foster and then adopt our dogs, Mac and Chaz. Chaz would literally have never existed in my life if I didn't take this leap. If I had just walked past him outside of the grocery store where they were doing an adoption event. It's just so mind-blowing to me to think about those things. Like every single choice, every decision we make, even like the more complex, the bigger, the crazier, the riskier decisions, those are often the ones that have the capacity to change who we are at our core. When Steve and I moved to California in 2011 with no money in our savings account, we had literally zero dollars in savings and no permanent place lined up to live, it was a real risk. It felt reckless and a little bit chaotic, but we were younger and I had a big dream and we did the thing. And two months into our move, I mean, we figured it out. We were subletting an apartment in Hermosa Beach, steps from the sand. And kind of a fun fact, sort of funny that it happened this way. We subletted that apartment that was owned by a former contestant of America's next top model. So crazy, right? And then one day on our way home from running errands, this was early on in our journey in California. I remember my car's alternator failed right in the middle of the freeway, which is super scary. I had just enough time to slowly pull over on the off-ramp for our exit before my car just puttered to a complete stop. I remember we walked the three miles home while our car got towed to an auto shop and we were quoted nearly $700 for the repair, which at the time was like, where and how are we going to afford this? I remember feeling like this isn't working, everything's going wrong. And I'll admit it, I was crying for most of that three-mile walk home. I was so upset. Even Steve hit a low where he was like, I'm homesick. I want to move back. But we persevered, we pushed through, and that two-month low quickly turned into this beautiful, thriving life. It wasn't perfect. There were definitely a lot of other ups and downs that I'm not gonna, you know, spend an hour telling you about. But we ended up living in Southern California for close to seven years. And imagine if we gave up at that two-month mark. Living in California, that's where Steve got his electrician license, where both of us ran our first five K's. It's where Steve did his first half marathon, it's where we adopted Mac and Chaz and even got married. And it's the one thing I can point to that changed my life in the biggest way out of everything I've ever done on this planet. And now, years later, fresh in, you know, the grief of Chaz being gone, I'm in the middle of a lot of transition and I'm on the cusp of another really big life decision. More to come soon on that. And I guess this whole situation just got me into that really reflective state. I've just been thinking a lot about life, about choices, about habits, about decisions. When I think back to my friend Bridget, she could still be doing her intuitive eating coaching. I could still be in my hometown. And I think a lot of this boils down to curiosity. Following our curiosities, being willing to take daring leaps sometimes into the unknown. I will never not hammer that home because I feel like following those things is what opens those doors and those portals into really exciting, amazing experiences. Next week, I am getting on a plane to San Francisco for a dream opportunity that I could not say no to. I don't want to be too cryptic about it, but I am not allowed to share details just yet. Can't talk about it publicly. But when I can, I will give you the full scoop and I will see you next week. Have a great day. Bye.