Maintaining Your Health On The Way To Financial Independence

Well, my friends, I was going to publish this post last Friday, getting back to my regularly scheduled weekly blog post. But alas, life had other plans. After 3 years of avoiding it, Mr. Dink and I finally came down with COVID-19.

How poetic that the week I was going to publish a post about health, we both got sick. Such is life, I suppose.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, I had absolutely no energy whatsoever to work on polishing this post to have it ready to publish last week. But I’m sort of glad I didn’t, because it gives this post new life. A fresh perspective.

Life is short, and there’s nothing like lying sick in bed with absolutely nothing to do (or nothing I can do) besides watch TV and wallow, freaking out about my shallow breathing and wondering how bad it would have been if I wasn’t vaccinated, to remind you that life is short.

This post became all the more important to me.

In contrast, here’s my original opening to this post…

Where are my fellow Millennials out there? Hello, and how is your body feeling these days? I don’t know about you, but mine feels like a delicate flower, needing water and tender care, ready to crumple from just one wrong step. My friends and I have slowly graduated over time from texting each other about what bar we’re going to spend our Saturday nights, to sending each other memes along the lines of “I sneezed wrong and threw my neck out for 3 days…what is happening to me?” 

All kidding aside, I’m betting that, no matter your age, you are at least somewhat aware of how your body changes over time. And if you’re in the financial independence (FI) community like me, you might be even more aware. Maintaining your health might just be a driving force on your FI journey.

In fact, for me, my health is actually one of my whys for slow FI. Slow FI, a term coined by The Fioneers, is all about enjoying the journey, living your best life now, instead of grinding away and waiting for the day when you’re full FI, ready to retire and sail off into the sunset.

I’ve learned a lot about myself over the years. I know now that I would much rather slow things down and extend my timeline to FI, instead of grinding away in my 9-5 for who knows how long. Part of the reason for this is my health.

For me, my overall health is all encompassing of physical, mental, and spiritual health. But for today, I want to focus on the physical side of things.

I don’t know about you, but in my case, my physical health has been a roller coaster ride on this journey I call life.

For starters, let me just acknowledge my privilege here. I recently had my annual wellness examination with my doctor (so privilege #1, I can afford healthcare or, in my case, have employer-sponsored health care). The report was that I am a completely healthy 36-year-old. And for that, I am eternally grateful.

But I have also been acutely aware of how much my physical health matters, and how much I took my physical health for granted, since I tore the ACL (anterior cruciate ligament) in my left knee in 2010 at the age of 23. From that point on, I have been plagued with knee issues that have left me unable to play my favorite sport on the planet on any competitive level, volleyball.

But that didn’t happen overnight.

My recovery from that 2010 ACL injury started out just fine. In fact, at first, I felt better than ever after coming back from that surgery.

But then I started to have pain again, in both knees. Since MRIs are so expensive, the doctors recommended to get one on just the knee that hurt more than the other. As a graduate student making $21k per year at the time, I agreed. From the MRI, I learned I had a “defect” (seriously why do they call it that?) in the cartilage of my patella, basically early arthritis. The only surgery they could do (other than a replacement, which I was too young to get), was one they give to professional athletes to try to regrow the cartilage that’s defective/missing.

It was a fairly easy surgery but with a grueling recovery, and guess what? It didn’t work. I still had pain. Not pain when I walked anymore, thank goodness (although that sometimes happens now). But pain when I did the heavy duty physical therapy (PT) exercises that I needed to do to get back to playing volleyball, or any sport really, at a competitive level.

After 2 years of PT, trying to get back to playing the sport that I had loved, that had been a huge part of my life, my then 29-year-old self finally had to face the music. Until I’m old enough to get a knee replacement, or until they come up with some new technology to fix me, volleyball at the level I want to play is probably not in the cards for me.

If I think back to that time, before I knew anything about lifestyle design or slow FI, volleyball was my why. Volleyball brought me the most joy of anything I was doing, and I organized my life around it.

So to have that thing taken away, was crushing.

For me, maintaining my health on my FI journey has been all about shifting my mindset

But over time, I did the only thing I could do to survive. I shifted my mindset.

For starters, I came to a place of acceptance. I’m a scientist, so I accepted the facts. Volleyball was not in the cards for me right now, at least not in the way I wanted it to be. I could accept this and move forward, or I could stay wallowing in self pity and be miserable, not just to myself but to everyone around me. Don’t get me wrong, I did plenty of that in the beginning (big apologies to my loved ones). But ultimately, I chose acceptance.

I learned to decouple my love of volleyball from my identity. For much of my short adult life up until that point, volleyball was a huge component. Aside from getting my PhD, being a skilled volleyball player was what I was most proud of. I lived for the next time I would get to play, the next tournament I would win. I had (maybe still have?) quite a competitive side, and it came out through volleyball. But I had to learn that that wasn’t all I was – a volleyball player with a PhD. There was so much more to me I didn’t even know about. And decoupling my identity from playing volleyball, alongside discovering slow FI, helped me see there was more for me to explore in life.

I focused on gratitude. At one point before the last surgery, I couldn’t even walk without pain. Although the surgery didn’t get me back to playing volleyball, it eliminated my pain from basic exercises like walking and going upstairs. I could still walk and hike, activities that brought me great joy, and for that I was grateful.

I leaned on my community and support system. Volleyball had been a huge part of my life, and once I couldn’t play anymore, coupled with the fact that I was moving in with Mr. Dink around the same time, almost an hour away from where I had lived on and off for the last 8 years, it was hard to maintain friendships. But I put in the effort, leaned on my friends and family, and began the process of growing and strengthening some of the best friendships I’ve ever had.

And over an even longer a period of time, I moved from a place of simple acceptance to actual joy and happiness. I was able to love and even celebrate my physical body again, for everything it could do, instead of focusing on what it couldn’t do for me anymore, where it let me down.

It’s not always easy

For the longest time, I felt so much shame toward my body and what it was no longer capable of.

It’s an absolute blessing to get to a place where I can believe that I’m strong and capable without being able to do the thing that used to make me feel the most strong and capable.

But sometimes, no matter how much work we’ve done, no matter how far we think we’ve come in the mindset shifting department, we find we slip right back into that shameful, lonely place.

In Chapter 6 of his book Die with Zero, which I read very recently, Bill Perkins talks about health and the importance of having experiences when you’re young and healthy. About how your health declines as you age, so you want to consider this fact when you plan your life experiences.

If you’re anything like me, or have even a remotely similar story, advice like this may make you want to crawl under the covers and never come out. Sometimes the pain of remembering what your body used to be able to do is striking. And it usually comes out of nowhere.

There I was, humming along with life, having changed my mindset and thinking everything was great. And then I read those words and everything came rushing back. Memories, emotions, rational or irrational.

It’s easy in situations like this to immediately start to wallow. Your thoughts may start to go crazy. Some of my most annoying include “the best times are behind me,” “my body has let me down,” and “I’ll never be able to do X, Y, or Z again.”

For anyone who has thoughts like this, you’re the reason why I wanted to write this post. They are some of the thoughts I hate having the most. And yet, they are so normal.

And yet, we are not alone.

We have to focus on what we still can do, rather than what we can’t do any longer. 

We have to shift our mindset.

Just like we did with our money when we all first jumped on the FIRE bandwagon. We realized we might have to spend less to be able to save more. We realized we may need to increase our income if we wanted to be able to save more. We figured out what was enough for us, so that we could spend in areas that bring us joy, and save and scrimp in areas that don’t matter as much. We stopped listening to the Joneses and thinking we had to keep up with them to be happy.

In my opinion, slow FI can help with these mindset shifts. Both around money and around life. We can do experiments to see if we need or want to make changes, to help us shift our mindset. We can use these experiments to help design our lives in a way that makes us excited to wake up everyday. That makes us not want to retire because we’ve found “work” that lights us up. That makes us enjoy the journey rather than race toward a finish line. Besides, we may not feel so good when we get to that finish line if we don’t stop to figure out what our enough is and what makes us truly, deep down happy.

And if we get good at this, if adapting and shifting our mindset becomes second nature, it will help us with the other bad stuff in life that will inevitably come up. Because it will. It will test us, and we’ll be ready.

Last summer, I injured my right knee. The “good” knee. At a yoga retreat (talk about embarrassing). At first, I reacted much in the same way as when I was dealing with my left knee problems. I was devastated.

But the difference this time was that I had been through this before. And I got gotten good at shifting my mindset. So it took me less time to bounce back mentally.

We get this one body in life, and I needed to protect it and nurture it, not be ashamed by it. Sure, I would need to slow down to recover, which I didn’t want to do. I would have to hike less, bike and walk more. But I could do this. I’d done it before. And it wouldn’t be forever.

This time, I did get an MRI on this other knee, and found out I had the same issue, that same “defect”, in my right knee as I had in my left knee. Again, of course I was devastated. Of course it caught me completely off guard. But the blow wasn’t so bad. I knew what this felt like.

And the most important thing?

I knew I would be ok. Because that stuff was no longer how I identified. Just like how I’d decoupled my identify from my job. There was so much more to me than my physical body.

Health continues to be a struggle, and it still needs to be prioritized

Although my health is a priority and one of my whys for FI, it can still be a source for struggle for me as I continue to work in a 9-5 job.

As a medical writer, most of what I do every day is – you guessed it – write. I do have a standing desk platform that can hold my laptop and mouse, but it only goes so far. That worked well when I as an editor and had a lot more meetings. It was easy to raise my desk up as a “break” for a 30 minute meeting.

But now, I hardly have any meetings. And the writing I do, I use multiple screens. They increase my efficiency profoundly. Sure, I could upgrade to a bigger standing desk, not just a platform, so I could raise up my laptop and all my screens. But I also don’t really like standing while working. The work I do is really deep work, and I don’t necessarily want to stand while I’m in deep concentration.

At one of the companies where I used to work, they had an ergonomic specialist give a talk on healthy habits at work and the ideal desk set-up. My big takeaway from the presentation was that there really was no perfect ergonomic desk situation. Instead of standing desks, treadmill desks, bike pedals under the desks, the presenter simply recommended exercising outside of work, taking lots of movement breaks, and not working so much. Most of my colleagues snickered and continued with their treadmill desk set-ups. I used that data to fuel my slow FI plans even more.

I tightened up my boundaries at work so that I could fit work around my life, and not the other way around.

It doesn’t mean it’s not still hard. I try to fit a walk in every day if I can, but it’s hard, and I want to be able to walk even more. I want to be able to go on hikes in the middle of the day.

But that’s where slow FI comes in. That’s why it’s so important for me to have goals, to keep my eye on the prize. I want to downshift sooner rather than later so that I can keep my health for longer.

Concluding remarks

Reading those lines in Die With Zero could have made me spiral, could have brought me right back to the self who was tied to a different identify. Could have made me wallow in my knee stuff, reminded me how much I can’t do anymore, how I lost the thing I loved the most before I even turned 30.

It was a long battle, but I had to adjust. I have adjusted. I’ve changed my mindset, discovered my love for walking, found gratitude, come to accept what I can’t change.

And more recently, I’ve discovered a new sport to love: pickleball. I’ve even decided that now that I’m going to start playing a sport again, I’m going to take back up my physical therapy exercises, on a less rigorous scale, as another way to try to maintain health and avoid injury on my slow FI journey.

When the past comes up, when I find myself thinking about volleyball, it still hurts. But overall, I’m fine. I’ve found new joy in life.

Sometimes I think about my grandfather, whom I was close with up until the day he died. He played tennis at a competitive level until he was 85. 85! What a gift!

At 85, he started dealing with neuropathy (numbness and tingling) in his feet and legs. It got so bad that he couldn’t play anymore. He saw doctor after doctor to try to figure out how to fix it. Every single one told him the same thing, that this was a pretty natural part of aging, quite normal for someone in their 80s, and there wasn’t a whole lot he could do. Or they gave him a medication to try that didn’t work. My grandfather couldn’t think or talk about anything else. He was consumed by the fact that he could no longer play the sport he loved. He talked about health and complained about the fact that he couldn’t play every time I saw him. Instead of being grateful for all the time he had gotten to spend playing, he remained bitter about it until his last day on earth.

After Mr. Dink and I were feeling better from COVID, but were still testing positive, I decided I needed to get out of the house. We were going stir crazy. So we opted to take a nice fall drive (the foliage here in Vermont is nearing peak in the higher elevations, as you can see from this week’s cover photo!) and go on one of our favorite hikes (about an hour on relatively flat ground in the woods). We stopped by the reservoir where we love to paddle and where we got engaged. As we drove home, I was filled with immense gratitude that what we had just done, the activities we had chosen to do that day, we would very likely be able to do until we’re much older. Of course there’s always a chance that that won’t be true, but in the grand scheme of things (and compared with playing volleyball or another extreme sport), it’s likely.

I may not be able to play volleyball, but I can take a drive and a walk with my husband on a beautiful fall day. And that’s enough for me.

I thought about my grandfather and who was better off. If I’d trade a memory like that, a perfect fall day with my husband, to be able to play volleyball until I’m 85. I know my answer. What would yours be?