Soooo I Ate Meat for the First Time in 7 Years

and now I'm having an identity crisis (jk...kinda). If I'm sure about anything, it's that my thoughts, opinions, and perspectives are ever evolving. Changing our mind on topics we previously identified with can feel scary, so let's chat about it.


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Transcript

Today, I had some thoughts, and they're a little bit jumbled. They're a little bit messy. But really, what I wanted to talk about was the topic of kind of realigning with yourself, of growing and discovering who you are, which I believe is fluid in the terms of the fact that it's never too late to reinvent yourself. It's never too late to have a fresh start. It's never too late to decide, Hey, this path I've been going on might not actually be what I want to do.

And I was listening to an episode by Emma Chamberlain called It's Okay to Change Your Mind. And this is what this episode is inspired by, because allowing yourself to be wrong is something that I think I have really had to grapple with in my adult life. I think as children, we have a pretty solid idea of what we think the world is, and what our reality is based on the perception that our parents build for us and based on the experiences that we have. And it's so different person to person. You know, you could grow up going on vacations, traveling the world.

Your perception of culture, religion, of everything is going to be different than someone that, you know, grows up within their 4 walls. Maybe you, you know, the most wild place you go is your backyard, and around the block is your grandparents' house. That's kind of how it was for me. I mean, you know, camping on the weekends, all that jazz. But my life was kind of contained to where I grew up.

And, of course, you know, going to the West Coast at times, California. But there is nothing I mean, California and Utah does not describe the world. And those are really my own two experiences growing up. And, you know, I lived in California until I was about 3, 3 and a half years old. But you're just a little child at that time.

You're really, honestly, just taking in your parents, your closest friends, the people that you are surrounded by most. And it's not until we get older that we sometimes realize, hold on, I think that I might be wrong about this, or wait a second. I think I'm gonna change how I feel about this topic because, you know, maybe you have new information. Maybe maybe you just decide, no, this isn't for me. That can be quite scary deciding that you might have been wrong about something or, you know, deciding that, actually, I do want to introduce these boundaries into my life because maybe you're sick of being avoidant attached or anxiety, having an anxious attachment, and you're looking for that more secure standing, not only with other people, but with yourself.

And I have absolutely 0 0, you know, credibility to be talking about anything therapy wise. As always, this is just my opinions and really, you know, just regurgitated stuff that we all think about day to day. But I'm going to try to talk about it and articulate it the best that I can. And so, if you are new here, hi, hello. I'm Hannah, and this is the Unrelatable podcast.

All of my episodes recently have kind of been focused on mental health. They've been more focused on what I'm going through right now, and that is not an identity crisis as I may have called it in my talk about depression, but more so just realigning with myself or maybe not realigning with myself because I feel like we are always growing, and we oftentimes want to put ourselves in a box because we find community in that. Right? When you describe yourself with a certain word or when you align yourself with, let's say, a specific political party, well, suddenly, you know that you belong to a community, and it feels good to belong to a community. It feels like you are supported.

You're not alone. You have direction in life. And these are things that all of us want. Right? These are things that bring us peace and back up our own opinions, our own belief systems.

And I think that, you know, like I was saying before, allowing ourselves to discover new information or to be wrong or to just grow into new areas of life that we weren't in before can really challenge us, challenge us and require us to not be rigid with ourselves. There's this quote by Tony Robbins. And, yeah, he might be a cult leader. I don't know. But he says that the biggest conflict that humans experience on a daily basis is the need to remain consistent with how we choose to identify ourselves.

And the need to remain consistent is usually what forces people to stay stuck. And again, if you're if you think that Tony Robbins is, like, runs a cold, that's totally fine. But I feel like he does have some really good things to say. And I really resonated with this because being able to be flexible, being able to admit and almost, I guess, humble ourselves and say, oh, okay. Maybe, you know.

And also, this doesn't have to include saying, maybe I've been wrong the past 7 years. It could say, you know what? I did the best with information that I had at the time, and now I have more information. And so, it's not about going hard on ourselves, on our past selves. Because like I said, we're always discovering new information.

And we all have an idea of who we would be at this time in our life when we were a kid. And so sometimes it can be hard to move off of that path. Sometimes it can be hard to recognize, oh, that's not the real world. You know, none of us have everything together, and we are constantly growing. I mean, I look at 16 year old Hannah.

And I would like to say that we are completely different now, but it's almost like I understand her so much more at this time. I thought that my identity at 16 was what I would hold on to for the rest of my life. At 21, at 25, you know, it just keeps shifting. And I was once told by somebody I was once told by somebody, literally, when I was 19 years old, Hannah, you're just not the same person as you were when you were 16, and I don't like it. And I just remember thinking, well, of course, I'm not.

Of course, I'm not the exact same person as 16 year old Hannah. When did this become something that we wanted to hold people to is our past selves? I mean, I understand we have an idea of what other people are as well, and we form friendships and relationships this way. And so, if you end up growing apart, it can feel scary. It can feel like someone's abandoning you at times.

But it's just so complicated in which we are all growing simultaneously together, but in all different directions. And sometimes you grow parallel, sometimes you end up splitting out. And so, it's really, really interesting. And I feel like a lot of times, most people who don't want you to change, most people who resist you changing is because they've been benefiting from the person you were before who probably had less boundaries. You know what I mean?

People holding you to the past version of who you used to be, that is them holding expectations of you. And this kind of goes along the same lines as my last episode of letting yourself be misunderstood and not feeling the need to live up to other people's expectations, to really value the opinion that you have over yourself rather than living your life for other people. I mean, I like to think about my stance on tattoos and piercings. Listen, I never thought anything I never thought anything negative about tattoos or piercings. In fact, that was something growing up that I never truly understood why it was such a negative why why there was so much negativity around it.

You know? Only have one piercing in your ears. Only only only have one piercing in your ears was really it. No tattoos allowed, all this kind of stuff. And I remember thinking, okay, why is this a concern?

And so, thankfully, I feel like that's not really the message anymore. And for any of those, for any of you that don't know what I'm talking about, I grew up as a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints. And that used to be a teaching of, you know, or suggestion or whatever you'd like to call it of not having more than one piercing. And, honestly, kind of grateful for the tattoo one because, you know, that if I would have gotten tattoos. The tattoos that I wanted when I was 18 was, you know, those tigers that are, like, on it's all over Pinterest, on that girl's back, and they're facing each other.

And they're, like, these really sick looking tigers. They're pretty cool. And there's a whole bunch of script down the spine. Oh, my gosh. Thank goodness that Hannah at 18 did not go get tattoos because I fully know that I would want removal 110%, and it'd be the most painful thing in the world.

And that's saying a lot because I find it really special, honestly, when people do get tattoos young, and they recognize them as a part of their growth and a part of their life, and they can see them and think, you know what? This is this represented who I was when I was 18, 19, 20, 21. I feel like that is really cool and honestly shows the amount of flexibility and acceptance you have with yourself and the state of mind that you're in. Because I know that I could not I could just simply not have that perspective for me. And that's just a personal thing.

But, you know, would I ever get a tattoo in the future? I don't know. I really don't know. That's still something where I don't have any opinions that they're negative by any means. I find them an amazing way to express yourself.

I love watching tattoo videos. I love watching you know, I was starting a tattoo apprenticeship, which is wild because I don't have any tattoos. But I just love the art of tattoos. I love ink on the skin. I don't know what it is about it.

I didn't end up continuing because I have what we like to call de quervain's tenosynovitis in my wrist and my thumb. And so it really made it quite impossible to hold a, tattoo gun in my hand. The vibrations of it just sent, like, insane amounts of pain up my arm, which is one of the reasons why I don't do permanent makeup now, just as a side note, I guess. But okay. Back to what we were talking about.

Why is it scary to change her belief systems and to change and to grow? Well, I feel like we all have such a close lens on ourselves, and whether it's through our own eyes, and it's almost internalized criticism. Because there's been so many times in my life where I had an idea ideology that was really, really, really hard to move on from. And then you add in social media. And, you know, we want to belong to certain groups.

We wanna belong to, you know, certain social groups or expressions, you know, the freedom to express who you are. And then let's say you express who you are, and then 5 years later, you think, wait a second. I just don't align with that anymore. I mean, let me tell you this much. I used to have plant based in my social media captions.

Because when I was I think this was in 2017, the summer of 2017, it was this first summer that Caden and I were married. I hope that I have these years right. But I had done so much research on animals, on the dairy industry, on the meat industry, on these really, really, really multifaceted topics and things where I just didn't agree with the inhumane way that animals were being eaten and killed and all that kind of stuff. And it really struck a chord with me so much as to where I said, I can't contribute to this. You know, I was looking up the environmental damage.

I was looking up so many things. And, of course, there were biases to everything. Whichever way you're looking at, there's always gonna be a bias. But I went so far as to put it in my caption, my bio on Instagram, that I was plant based because, no, what what I ate wasn't my entire personality, but it was almost deeper than that. It was deeper than that as to where my in my view, in my opinion, it showed that my morals were for, honestly, the voiceless for animals who they can't defend themselves.

I mean, we're here on Earth, and we're just doing whatever we want with the wildlife. We're doing whatever we want with animals. We're breeding them. We're doing this. We're doing that.

You already know. And it just really didn't sit right with me. I was reading papers and papers on on the effects, psychologically, of people who worked in slaughterhouses, and I just it didn't feel good. It really didn't. And so, I told Caden, I said, I'm going vegan.

And he said, how am I going to be married to a vegan? He was distraught. He could not believe it. It was something that I did not expect at all. But he was like, Hannah, how how is this going to work?

What are we going to do if you don't eat meat? And I told him, I was like, it's not that serious. I don't expect you to not eat meat. But it was something that I felt really strong about. And this was during the time where I had already done a few bodybuilding shows.

And so I really got excited. I got excited to be a vegan bodybuilder. I wasn't technically plant based because plant based means that you're not eating really anything processed either. And I, for sure, was eating processed foods to get in my protein because my protein was still, I don't know, a 150 grams of protein plant based. You're you kinda have to start eating some processed foods, some chemically made foods.

And so I did that, and I did that for about 5 years. I lived this vegan, plant based, whatever diet. And I presented myself as a vegan bodybuilder, and I got praise for that. And it made me proud because I thought that I was, you know, or not I thought, but I had hoped that I was influencing people to maybe eat less meat, or to think about animals to buy sustainably to, you know, maybe purchase meat from farmers rather than from big distributors like Walmart. I don't know what I was thinking that I was doing, and I don't even know if it ended up making any sort of impact.

I don't know why I thought that I was, you know, like, a social social justice warrior here. But and that's not to say that I'm, like, mocking my past self, because I hold that very dear to my heart, because I know how empathetic I was and still am towards animals, towards cows and pigs, and animals that people just kind of think of as well, they're just for us. They're here for the only purpose being for us to eat them. I've never liked that take because I don't agree that we just get to decide that for them. I don't know.

I still have weird feelings about that. But I really started learning more about the effects of, you know, you know, we're we're thinking that all this pollution and stuff is from cows farting in the air, but what about all these jets that these billionaires are flying around? You know, when we stopped drinking out of plastic straws, which I still don't do, and I honestly don't know a lot of research about these specific things. But, you know, it came out later that, oh, it isn't actually causing a huge difference, and it's been a marketing ploy. And there are just so many different marketing ploys where I just got sucked in so easily.

And that's not to say that being vegan or plant based or vegetarian or whatever is a marketing ploy, because I actually felt really great for a long time eating a vegan diet up until 2020, which I guess was I guess I'd be 4 years 3 or 4 years into it. 3 years into it. And in 2020, wow, I must have grossly overestimated how long I was vegan. Let me think. 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020.

Yeah. So in 2020, I don't know if it was the fact that I was in my house a lot more because of the pandemic and the fact that I you know, we moved for another summer of summer sales. So we moved from Utah to Manchester, New Hampshire. And I got really lucky because we moved out there with our team. And since our team was together every day, working together every day, we were still gathering together.

And so that was really lucky that I had that community. And, also, it was a part of the United States where I think it was 5 states that were allowed to travel amongst each other, and they were all of the northeastern states of the US. So it was New York, New Hampshire, Rhode Island. I don't know about Connecticut. I think Mass was a part of that, Massachusetts.

And so it really ended up being positive in the social aspect, but I think I was also still home a lot of the time. Okay. Sorry. Not positive as in COVID was positive in the social aspect. I mean, the social aspect was still, thankfully, there within, you know, the 10 to 15 people that we are with in the summer.

That's what I mean by that. But anyways, that being said, the East Coast really didn't start going back to normal life for several months. For example, Utah, the gyms were closed for maybe 2 weeks. The East Coast, I was planning on moving to New Hampshire and doing group fitness classes immediately upon moving there. The gyms didn't open till end of July, August.

They were closed for months months. And so, yeah, there's just a whole bunch of random random differences there. But the main fact is, is that I it's almost like my body started craving something else. It was really sick of the food that I was giving it. And I had been making, you know, homemade seitan or seitan, however you wanna call it.

And for any of you that don't know what seitan is, it's essentially a meat substitute made out of wheat gluten. And it is really, really low in calories, such as fat and carbs, really high in iron, really high in protein, and you can kind of slice it any way that you want to. You can make it into a fake steak. You can make it into fake chicken, all that kind of stuff. And it is in, you know, more Asian cuisines.

And so it's not something where, you know, vegans invented it. And it's something a little bit more natural where, you know, you can make it at home and all that jazz. So I had been making that, and I had been eating that. It had been a really big source of protein for me through my bodybuilding shows, and I was proud of that. You know, I was proud of my placements in bodybuilding.

I was proud to represent the fact that you can gain muscle while not eating meat. Is it going to be as much? Absolutely not. That's just a fact. And I kind of denied that for several years until I realized, okay, Hannah, at least don't deny the obvious, the fact that it is easier to put on muscle while eating meat.

And, so I essentially decided I need to diversify my diet a little bit, please. I had always told myself when I first started eating more plant based being vegan, that the second I started feeling restricted, I know from my history that that can be a really slippery slope. And so I decided that if I needed to ever expand my food options, if I was feeling restricted or I just had no idea where to go and felt caged in by being vegan, that I would step away from that because the focus of being vegan for me was not diet. I wasn't doing it just to benefit myself. It was more so animals, environment, all of that jazz, but I'd always had that in the back of my mind that if necessary, I would take a step back from it.

And eggs still disgusted me. I thought these eggs are unfertilized chicken periods, and I couldn't get over it. And I'm sorry for anyone that didn't wanna hear that. But there were so many things in which I had learned of just how dairy is made and how much, for example, which everything that I'm telling you right now are things that I have changed my mind on. So don't worry.

We'll get to that. But with milk, you know, they allow, I think don't quote me on this. This is how it was 4 years ago. But they used to allow a full syringe of pus per glass of milk or something like that. Because these automatic, machines that they tie to a cow's udders, they don't just stop perfectly right when they're out of milk.

It may keep going for a little bit, and you may get some pus in there. And so, I just had all these disgusting I just didn't wanna eat it as well. That was a huge part of it. People would say, Oh, my gosh. Don't you miss eating meat?

No, I don't miss eating meat. If I did, I would simply go to the store or go to a restaurant and go eat it. And I I didn't miss it. I didn't miss making it. But my body, I could recognize was in desperate need of change.

And so I started eating Oikos Greek Yogurt. I know, pretty wild. Pretty wild, Hannah. And that was honestly really hard for me because I didn't want to go back on being a vegan bodybuilder. I didn't want to change really the identity that I had aligned myself with, of being an advocate for, I guess you could say the voiceless.

I think that's what I said earlier, of just being an advocate for animals. And my care for animals in my mind, if you actually cared for animals, you wouldn't eat them. And caring about animals and eating them just didn't line up on the same spectrum for me. And I didn't necessarily speak those judgments out loud, but I certainly held them with within myself. Right?

And people would say, oh, does it trigger you when I eat meat? People would literally ask me the most wild questions, you guys. I could I could go on a whole other podcast episode about this, and it wouldn't trigger me. But I would think, yeah. Like, I think that it's good to have balance.

You know, I think it's good to not have every single meal contain a bunch of meat, and that's really an American that's really the American culture is just meat on every plate. And so I just, you know, went a whole 180, didn't eat meat. Well, comes 2020, I start eating yogurt again. And few months later, I decide, okay, I'm gonna start eating eggs now. And then what happened last fall?

Well, actually this was a year ago last fall, so I guess it'd be oh, my gosh. It's almost 2 years ago. My bodybuilding coach said, Hannah, let's get some blood work done. Got some blood work done. Guess what Hannah is deficient in?

Iron. Oh, my gosh. No surprise there. Right? Because, of course, I'm deficient in iron.

I wasn't eating meat, and it was just something that I was super deficient in. And my coach essentially said, hey, you know, I've supported your vegan lifestyle for so long, your vegetarian lifestyle, I guess, at this point for so long. But I really believe it would be beneficial for you to start eating salmon. If you want to continue bodybuilding, if you want to, honestly, not even continue bodybuilding, but have a healthy body, This is what is needed. And so I started my journey of eating salmon.

And I I think I had maybe one salmon, and I said, nope, never again. So it took me about a year after that to, you know, last of all, to really start recognizing the fact that my body is deficient. And I'd watched so many videos, so many vegan YouTubers, so many people that said you can remain completely healthy. You know, I've been vegan for 10 years. I've been vegan for 5 years, and I'm healthy.

And this is how you use your supplements. This is how you do this. This is how you do that. Well, yes, you can supplement as much as you want. You can always supplement with anything.

Right? But But it's never going to be as good as the actual source, and so I started eating salmon consistently, you know, 3 or 4 times a week. Long story short, you guys don't need to know my entire history with, you know, going from vegan to vegetarian to pescatarian, I guess. But I just wanted to say all that because guess what I did this last weekend? Guess what I did?

I had a beef burger for the first time in 7 years. No. Yes, 7 years. I'm 27. And I went vegan when I was 20.

So my first burger in 7 years, well, what caused it? Honestly, I can tell you my body has been 100% craving craving it. It's been craving iron. No, I'm not pregnant. But it's been craving these essential amino acids from other sources than what I've been getting them from.

And this has been really hard for me because, first of all, I just think meat is disgusting still, so working on that. But I just don't like the idea of letting that go, of letting that version of myself go. And it's all internalized. If I'm being honest, I don't know one other vegetarian in my life. You know, I don't have vegetarian friends.

And it's just allowing myself to grow. Our needs change. Our bodies change. Our hormones change. I mean, we have predispositions to diseases and we need to keep that in mind.

And it can just be paralyzing. It can be a paralyzing fear of being perceived as changing or as oh, yeah, maybe it wasn't that I was necessarily wrong. Because from the start, from the very start, when someone would ask me, Hannah, do you think that you are always going to be vegan? Do you think you're never gonna eat meat again? I always said, Well, for now, I couldn't imagine ever eating meat again.

But I can't speak for Hannah in 5 years. And I always said that. And I think that that was something really positive that I did for myself. Because subconsciously, I always knew that if it needed to happen, I would allow it to happen. And that has come with a lot of a lot of, I don't wanna say a lot of growth, but just a lot of reflection of the fact that, especially in this day and age, there's so much there's so many changes all the time.

There's so much information out there. There's so many things and ideologies that we grow up in. There's so many opinions that we have. You know, a lot of times, we adopt our parents' opinions on life. And then we get into the real world, and we realize, okay, not only am I a separate person from my parents, which can be an entirely other conversation because even as a kid, you know, you might not agree with lots of things that your parents think.

But the fact that they grew up with different parents, both of them, and then they came together and raised me. And now I'm growing up in a world completely different from where my parents grew up in. And it's just this wild ever changing universe where when did it become a negative thing to to change, to continually accept and learn new things about yourself? Maybe it's not discovering who you are, but just learning new things that you like, which I guess is honestly the same description as discovering who you are. But I don't like the terminology because it has almost had a negative connotation of it to discover yourself, to be authentic to you.

I mean, how many times have you heard this being described as negative and selfish? And I'll tell you a secret. There is nothing scarier than questioning the I ideologies that you've lived by your entire life. There's nothing scarier than okay. There are many things scarier.

Okay. But this is just a term I'm using. There's nothing more wild to me than realizing, okay, Hannah, you might actually have to start eating meat. And, no, it's not gonna be the end of the world. It's gonna be uncomfortable for sure.

And you're almost losing this piece of yourself that had these it almost feels like I'm losing this piece of myself that had these morals and values. But I know that that's not the case because I know where we are purchasing our salmon from and our meat from, and we're purchasing it directly from farmers and from really good sources and doing everything that we can. Anyways, it's just the fact that you can change your mind whenever you want. And it's never ever, ever too late to reinvent yourself. It's never too late to realize, okay, maybe I grew up thinking that piercings were evil.

Maybe I grew up thinking piercings were evil. And now I can see that, wait a second, it's just a hole on my ear. If I wanna take it out, I can take it out. I know I already talked about this several times, my nose piercing, but I took it out because of the perceptions of other people the first time. And I took it out because I did not like how I was being actually, I can't say that I didn't like how I was being perceived because it was something that I did for myself.

But I I kind of had to take it out because of the perceptions of others. And we're not doing that anymore. We're not doing that. We're not going to continue living upon the expectations of other people because what happens when you are living for others? Well, you never truly know who you are, and it becomes harder and harder to sit with yourself.

And it becomes harder and harder to be able to learn new things about the world and to create your own opinions. Yes. Of course, it would be amazing in this day and age to be surrounded by all the all the people that think the exact same way that you do. But if we're being honest, I mean, it's not very common anymore. And I think that a lot of times we were told that that's a negative thing.

But being surrounded with people that have different perspectives than you is actually healthy. It allows us to to grow. It allows us to, honestly learn to defend your position, if anything. If there's something that you believe, and you know that it's not a belief that you will budge on, well, then you just become stronger in that. But if someone comes to you with new information, and you hear it and you think, oh, actually, this is something I would be interested in knowing more about.

Well, I feel like there it shows humility, and it shows the fact that life is ever changing. We're always learning new information. We're always discovering new information. I going back to being vegan, just because I feel like this is the best example that I have right now that is so evident in my life, I don't want to be filling my body with processed proteins. I don't think that that is the healthiest thing that I can do for myself.

You know, surprise, surprise. Not like anybody didn't tell me this. But it's just the fact that we kind of have to learn and adapt our choices, depending on our needs at the time as well. Because as I said before, back when I decided to go vegan, it wasn't anything that was negatively affecting me. And at this point, it is.

You know, at this point, I'm deficient in many in many things. And at this point, you kind of have to start thinking, okay, Hannah, what about my future? What about my future gut microbiome? You guys know what I'm talking about. I feel like I'm beating a dead horse with this, which I also hate that term.

Man, can we come up with a different way to say that? But, anyways, I think that especially in the world that we're living in today and the world that I grew up in, the discussion is constantly about who you are and what you represent. And, honestly, you know, I don't feel like that's unique to any person or religion or I I just think it's what the society is. It's kind of putting ourselves in these boxes, and the world even wants to put us in boxes and makes it kind of something that we want to belong to. And, of course, we want to belong to a community, belong to a group of people and feel like we fit in, and to be around people that have similar values and, you know, similar thought processes that we do and even those who inspire us.

But that's not to say that you can join one of these groups. Let's say, okay. I'm gonna take it to pottery since that's kind of my hobby right now. That's not to say that, you know, if you put 6 months into it and you just decide that it's not for you and you hate doing pottery on the wheel, the sunk cost fallacy goes like this where we feel like we've invested so much time into something that why would we change now? It's just going to be a huge amount of time of experience that we've put into this.

And is it all for nothing? But I think the all for nothing mindset is limiting because then it keeps us from allowing ourselves to shift and to grow into the areas that we need to, and that maybe we didn't foresee as being an option before. I can't even tell you how many hobbies I've tried. I've tried Muay Thai, and I had this dream for so many months of just being so good at this martial art. And I tried it.

I certainly did, and I realized, no, Hannah, this is not for you. Another one, the air force ROTC. I was in that, and I realized later on that it was not conducive to not only what I looked into my future as being, but also, you know, being married and having Caden moving several months of the year and me going somewhere else several months of the year, it just didn't seem conducive or beneficial to our relationship. But, hey, I would have never known that if I wouldn't have ever joined and tried. I also wouldn't have met my closest college friends that I have from college if I would have never joined the ROTC when I did.

I mean, if I'm being honest, those are the people that I still talk to from college were those who I was in the program with. And so sometimes the benefit of something isn't the skills, but the friends you make along the way. No. I'm serious. I think that being able to change your mind every single day, being able to learn, and maybe you believe something, and you decide to take it back later.

Maybe you say something, and you regret it. And you look at that. And you think, okay. Well, where can I grow from this? What can I what can I do with this?

Because I feel like we're constantly or not we, maybe just myself. I'm always thinking about who I am and finding my purpose where it can almost come to a point where you just forget to live life. If you're so concerned about, you know, being happy, you're never actually going to be happy. I mean, we know this. The pursuit of happiness is not the pursuit of freedom, because happiness isn't a destination.

This is starting to sound really corny, but it's just an interesting paradigm shift because a lot of times we can feel lost because we don't know who we are. And I think that that's the point is the fact that we never truly know what is going to happen in life. And we can sit here, I could sit here and say and preach all I want that this is who I am and this is not going to change and I am confident in this and and whatnot. But I think that it is so, so, so important to feel calm about who you are and to almost accept, okay, I am ever changing, and I don't need to be searching for a purpose constantly. You know, I don't need to be searching for, for example, career wise.

A lot of us grew up thinking, okay, our career is going to define who we are. It's going to define the people that we're with, and it defines our personality and things that we care about. And so, you know, the medical field, typically, people are more, you know, they they center their lives around people, and they really care about taking care of people. Same thing about teachers. They care about our our children and the next generation in the world.

And they love teaching, and they usually love the subject that they're learning, and they're passionate about it, and they want to share that with others. You could say the same thing for everything. That's how I felt with working out. In the beginning of going to college, I started studying kinesiology, which is exercise science along those regards. And I thought this is going to be something I'm going to do because I wanna share my passion with working out with the world because it affected and helped me so much in in high school.

And, you know, my it it it had just really shaped who I was because it gave me an outlet that I needed, and I wanted to share that with everyone. I wanted to share, like, the newfound freedom that I had found, but it didn't end up being something that I enjoyed doing for work. It was more a passion that I realized was limited to the fact where when it became my job, it became a little unsustainable. And not to not to say that I didn't enjoy the idea of it because if we're being honest, I never became an an individualized personal trainer. I did do group fitness training, and that was absolutely wonderful.

And the only reason why I stopped doing that was, you know, the conflict with scheduling and my job and Cadence's job just kind of overlapping and not having very much time together. And it it kind of started being something that wasn't sustainable because I was working out too much. But we get to do that. We get to try something new and change our mind. I feel like, especially for me, I felt guilty trying new things and getting really good at them and then moving forward and moving on.

I used to think that I was quitting these things. And so being able to change the language around that to, no, Hannah. You didn't quit doing permanent makeup. You've moved forward from that. And one of the reasons why is, I mean, I built my whole clientele, and then we moved all of a sudden.

2nd reason is my wrist and my thumb, the whole movement with my hand, it was really debilitating pain and chronic pain that I was experiencing. And so, realistically, if I lived where I lived before with my clients, I could for sure do it once a week. Right? But I'm at a point now where it's, like, it's it wouldn't be worth the complete necessary rebranding and everything of reaching out to people where I'm living. And so, yeah.

I feel like sometimes we don't think it's an option to be and sit with who we are today. There is this constant need to grow. There's a constant desire to consistently create discipline in ourselves and to consistently develop ourself and to always be working towards bigger and better things. And so, of course, we're going to feel some pressure. Of course, we're going to feel the need to almost put ourselves in a box or consistently seek for who we are.

But I feel like, you know, it can come to a point where it's it can be quite damaging, especially when you identify your self worth with your accomplishments, with your achievements, when at the end of the day, we should be happy sitting in the middle of a forest or working on a farm and coming home in the evening to our families, and that should be fulfilling towards us. It shouldn't be this race of, okay. Oh, yeah, Hannah. Of course. You know, you've competed in 6 bodybuilding shows, but you're not a pro.

So that's not actually a real accomplishment because anyone can compete in bodybuilding shows. That's been something that I've told myself for years years is, oh, okay. Yeah. Whatever. I've done 6 bodybuilding shows, and I'm still not pro.

I've almost looked at it as this negative concept of the fact that I've done so many, so it's embarrassing that I'm not a pro bodybuilder yet. And I'm thinking, Hannah, why are you thinking this? I I've gotta get this out of my head that this means any less. Like, it almost creates this weird paradigm in self belief. And so yeah.

You know, like I said before, if we put ourselves in a box or if we don't put ourselves in a box, the world is going to the world's going to create it anyways. The world is going to put you in a box anyways. Your friends, your family, people oh, sorry. I guess not friends and family. People that don't truly want to know you for who you are are most likely going to put you in a box.

Sometimes that's your old friends. Sometimes that's family or extended family. Because a lot of times we seek for understanding. And when there's not a place where we can understand what's happening, we create scenarios. We create conclusions in our own mind.

So while I you know, for example, if I don't understand why somebody quit something or they decide they change their views on something, I could go in and create a whole assumption about that. Right? But it's, most of the time never going to be true. But a lot of times in our life, we're raised with these beliefs where, Oh, if you see someone do this, it's because they believe this. It's just so easy to generalize people like that.

It's easy to stick people in boxes and all the while we don't wanna be put in any sort of box, but we see a statement that someone posts and we assume, oh, they must be anti vaxx. Oh, they must be, you know, anti this, pro this. They must be right wing, left wing. They must be you know what I mean? It just has gotten to a point where if you see something I mean, okay.

We can use common sense and and whatnot and usually be able to tell some of these broader spectrum, some of these broader things. But a lot of the times, unless somebody is labeling themselves and coming out saying, I am I believe this or I believe that, assuming the labels of people and putting them in extremely generalized categories doesn't allow us to understand the nuance of what it's like to be this person or the nuance of their beliefs. And I think it can be harmful because then we don't allow people to explain themselves, to explain their stance. They might just hear, oh, you're pro this. That must mean that you hate seniors, for example.

Oh, if you're pro if you're pro taxes, you must be hateful to Gen Z and to millennials. And if you're pro taxes, then you must be extremely rich and you can afford it and all these things. It's just all of these are wild examples that hardly even correlate with each other because honestly, taxes suck, and I really wish we didn't have to pay them. It kinda makes me sick looking at a calendar, a 12 month calendar, and saying, okay. So January, February, March, April, May, working for free.

What else do we got here? So I'm just trying to give some some random examples here, but I'm I'm sure you also have something in your mind where you're like, okay. Yeah. I have actually tried this several times, and I quit, and I always felt guilty. But I'm here to say, you don't have to feel guilty anymore.

Going from being this example I'm talking about today of, you know, going from eating normally my whole life to being vegan, and, you know, for that, it was more of a lifestyle even. I wouldn't even call that a diet when I was vegan. I would say, no. This is a lifestyle. It's my morals.

It's my beliefs, whatever. Going from that to pescatarian or to to being vegetarian to being pescatarian to now. I just had my first burger on Saturday. It's weird, but I'm trying not to, like, I'm trying not to internalize it very much. Everyone's asking me, how do you feel?

How do you feel? And I'm just trying to just go with the flow and not think about it that hard because it's difficult letting go of things that I thought I was firm in my beliefs on. But it also it also shows some flexibility. I'm glad now because my blood work is looking so much better, and it always bothered me because people would talk to me all the time when I was vegan. And they would say, yeah.

My aunt was vegan for 6 months, and then she lost a ton of iron. She was deficient. And, oh, yeah. This person was vegan, and they couldn't have children because of it, or this person was vegan and it affected their mental health. And it just always was annoying to me because, honestly, no.

I I would never sit there and ask for people's opinion of what I ate or my lifestyle. It was just always given freely while I was eating, while I was any sort of in a social area with people, with friends around food. It was always like, oh, tell me more about that. I'm not even kidding. I wish I was making this up, but it was a part of not not even kidding.

So many conversations. Oh, Hannah, you would really like this. Don't you want just a bite? No. If I wanted just a bite, I would eat 1.

I promise you that is not the way that is not the way to talk about it. And hey, maybe people that have always maybe if you've always eaten meat, I don't know. Have you felt like vegetarians are constantly asking you why you eat me and saying all the negative things? Because maybe it's going both ways. It just I'd never done that to people before or ask them about it.

And so it was just such a wild thing to me. Honestly, I know that there were just a lot of curious people, especially since I've been bodybuilding through it. And so I understand, you know, questions are fun. Questions are great, whatever. But it was always it was always toned with a sort of criticism of, oh, that's not gonna last.

Oh, you're not gonna be the best bodybuilder if you don't eat meat. Oh, you're not training the most effectively or efficiently. Oh, your system is probably deficient in this and this and this and this. Oh, my cousin was vegan, and it didn't work out for them. And so I think that that's kind of where I'm coming from this perspective of it being annoying was because it was always tinged with some sort of, Oh, cool.

Would never do that myself kind of thing. And, yeah, I don't know. That's just like a little that's just a funny thing that I'm remembering since we're talking about this today. But anyways, being flexible in learning these things about ourselves can be so helpful and beneficial for us in the long run. I mean, realistically, weightlifting, bodybuilding.

Bodybuilding is not sustainable. We already know this. I don't wanna sound like a broken record. So when the time comes to move on from it being more of a sport and to do it more so just, you know, continually for health and for bone strength and growth and whatnot. I think that it's, it's something that is probably also going to happen in my future.

And that's okay. And I've heard this is really hard actually for a lot of collegiate athletes where you grow up preparing and preparing for high school because you wanna join the high school team. And then on the high school team, let's say it's soccer or football or volleyball, you do amazing. You get recruited by a college, you go and play in college, and then suddenly it's over. I've heard so many times that there can be a lot of tough coming to self conversations and almost identity crises of, oh, my gosh.

This is what I've spent so much time doing. What do I do now? What is my identity now? And I think that's because we tie ourselves so closely. You know, we tie our identity to these things so closely.

And so I think being a little bit more fluid and maybe not at least for myself, I'm trying to define myself less by what I do and just be consistently a good person through whatever form of art or sports or hobbies that I end up doing. Like I was saying, you know, our needs change, Our bodies change. And being able to accept, you know, our mentality changes. Our perspectives of the world changes. When you travel, you see a lot of things outside of the four walls of your home, or outside the borders of your state, or your country.

And it's not a negative thing to to learn about these things. It's not a negative thing to become more authentically you, to learn, and even the definition of being authentic to you. You know, what does authenticity even even mean in this day and age? Because like I said, I feel like it is very looked down at in a lot of ways. And it's it's not even something that we are.

You know, being authentic, it's not something that you have or don't have. It's a conscious it's a conscious space of mind that you live in. And it's, you know, the choices that you make day to day that aligns best with your values. And to be honest and to this this this definition right here says, it's about the choice to show up and to be real. The choice to be honest.

The choice to let our true selves be seen. And I've lived a lot of my life in dishonesty and not being who I actually felt that I was. And not, you know, of of essentially apologizing for decisions that I've made and feeling bad and feeling the impact that it would have on other people when, at the end of the day, it impacts you the most when you are being inauthentic to yourself. Being able to realign with yourself, being able to ask yourself, okay. Yeah, I have always wanted a second piercing.

Am I going to burst into a pile of flames if I get it? Nope. And so let's do it. And then you can take it out if you hate it. You know what I mean?

We can change every single day. We can figure out who we are every single day. I can have an opinion one day and become more educated with new information the next. Politics, religion, the corporate world, family opinions, friends, honestly, just real life stuff. Sometimes it makes us feel like we are not allowed to learn, to grow, to change, to adapt.

And even if you do, and even if it's looked down upon, that's why staying true to yourself is the best thing to be. Because when you aren't true to yourself, you attract people that believe that you are one way. And once you finally can't stand not to hold yourself to your standards of who you actually are, once you start being who you are, then you'll begin losing friends. And I feel like that's a natural thing to happen in the beginning. It's natural, but that doesn't make it any less painful.

And so the second that you are able to start being honest with yourself, to start being honest with others, that is when we're able to cultivate real and honest relationships. And the most important relationship you have is with yourself. And I know I'm, like I said, beating a dead horse. But yeah, thanks for letting me kind of talk about this in a very sporadic way. It's just been something that I've been thinking about recently, because I've been getting down on myself about not feeling like I've progressed in very many ways, as we do when we are in a state of depression, anxiety, all the things or if you're doing, you know, too much self reflecting.

But I have to recognize that this isn't even a whole other conversation, that striving for consistent change and striving to always be be better and to always have the best discipline and the best schedule and to wake up and to not drink caffeine first thing in the morning, to make sure you drink a ton of water, to make sure to make your bed immediately, go to the gym, don't eat within 3 hours of going to bed, don't do this, and do this, and live the most optimal lifestyle. Well, what happens when you get burnt out from living this optimal lifestyle? Well, it's it's not it's just not feasible. It's not realistic. And so it almost creates this loop of, oh, my gosh.

If I'm not this, if I'm not this disciplined person, then who am I? Well, we just are. And we're human, and we're not meant to be robots living this extremely structured lifestyle that ends up burning us out. And we're not meant to stay in a singular box. Changing careers, in my opinion, is normal.

Because again, our high school selves that studied our whole lives to become something specific or our college selves that end up doing something very specific. I mean, I think it's amazing when people end up in a career field where you can change positions, and you can change what you wanna do and you can specialize in things. I think that is so cool and so amazing. And it's just super funny that we hold ourselves to these ridiculous standards of the fact that if we start something, well, then a year from now, we should be really good at it. We should be amazing at it.

And if people ask you, oh, why did you quit that? That's so crazy. You were so good at it. Instead of feeling guilty, you know, you feel excited. Oh, yeah.

Well, instead, I'm doing this now. And, yeah, I did the most that I could with that project, or I went as far as I could in my degree, and now I'm doing this. I don't know. It's just something interesting. And I think it's actually the root of being human, and it should be exciting.

The fact that we have so many possibilities out there, so many routes of things we can do, who we can be, and it just creates so much more connection in people, especially when you when you find people that find you interesting. You know, whether they're people within your within your hobbies, within your religion, within your belief system, anything. Or if they're not in it. It's just really cool to be able to connect with people and to learn more about people and to share the things that you love and to grow and adapt as a person. One of my favorite creators on Instagram, I've seen her go from working out to becoming an IFBB bodybuilding pro, to now she has several kids, and she's not about the bodybuilding lifestyle at all.

She exercises to be healthy and to show her kids a good example of what balance is. And that is so much growth. It's amazing to watch my friends have kids and get pregnant and have children and grow. And it would just be a sad world if we only allowed ourselves to stay within the box, within the belief systems, within the personality that we had when we were 12 years old, when we were 16 years old. And I know it can create a lot of conflict internally because it it can be painful.

The process of figuring out who you are and allowing yourself to honestly just be and to stop intellectualizing everything, it's hard. It is really hard, and I do it every single day, and it's not something that I know how not to do. But it's something that I'm working on, and it's I feel like meditation would honestly just benefit me a lot right now. So maybe we'll be talking about that in the future. But thank you so much for listening to today's episode.

I feel like I this is kind of a soundboard for my thoughts and what's going on in life. And so, I appreciate any feedback you guys give. And if you resonate with my episodes, I always love hearing from you. Thank you so much for listening to The Unrelatable podcast, and I will see you next time. Byeeeeee :)