Am I Famous Now?
Sobering reflections from a newly-turned 21-Year-Old
Two days ago, I turned 21 years old.
It feels weird to say that. For the last five years, I’ve operated in spaces where the majority of my peers are older and more experienced than me. I’m selling software to those with 25+ years of insurance experience, and yet, I couldn’t celebrate our successes at a local pub or open bar.
This is the fourth year in a row that I’ve written a birthday article reflection. Four years of sitting down at my laptop for hours, regurgitating every new experience and reflection that summed up my existence for the past 365 days. My dad always says, “These reflections are more for you than anyone else,” and he’s right. Good to have you along for the ride, though.
It’s been an interesting lead-up to today. For the last week, wildfires have ravaged most of Southern California and I’ve spent hours crying about the state of the world. It’s been so devastating and my heart is breaking for everyone being affected. For the first time in a long time, it seems like everyone I know in California, even influencers I follow, are talking about the same things we’ve been preaching about for the last few years, and that’s both exciting and terrifying.
I went to the gym with one of my best friends and after our workout, we went over to the grass overlooking the machines to stretch. And it dawned on me: life doesn’t slow down. Regardless of how “frozen-in-time” California feels, no one in the gym is lifting any less or slower because of it. Cars are still lining the parking lot, people still came in to work, and even though this tragedy is happening just a few hours away, you would be none-the-wiser without social media. And this is how I know we’re going to prevail.
As cliche as it sounds, we first need empathy, then understanding, and then collaboration. The world keeps spinning and people keep moving, but it’s in our nature to get back up on our feet and move the tribe forward. Life doesn’t stop moving here in Vegas even when the heat wave is killing a hundreds of people a year, just like time doesn’t stop as soon as a major tragedy befalls a metropolitan area. Now, it’s about rebuilding stronger, which has been a big theme of the last year and my goal for the next year. I’m excited to tell you all about it.
But first, it’s time to introduce my new guiding words for the year. In case you’re new here, I decide on two words that highlight the most important things I want to emphasize for the year moving forward. Instead of super concrete New Year’s Resolutions, I’ve found that aligning myself with two core principles helps me stay flexible but make decisions that fall further in line with my ideal future self.
Last year, I chose CONSISTENCY and BALANCE and I feel like I embodied those pretty well. I was extremely consistent in building my startup and found balance in my connections with people and relationship with my boyfriend Som. I was consistent with exercise and lost 10 pounds while maintaining a healthy balance with food. The majority of choices I made feel like they steered in the right direction here without feeling restrictive.
Now, for this year, I’ve chosen STRENGTH and FRIENDSHIP as my two words.
I acknowledge that this sounds like a title for a My Little Ponies episode, but I digress.
I chose strength because of two main things:
- I want to hold my own and stay strong when things are rough for me mentally. I’ve learned a ton about myself this year (more on that later) and near the end of 2024, I felt myself wavering and making a ton of decisions that I just regretted later on, purely because I wasn’t prioritizing myself in that moment. I don’t ever want to let people walk all over me and because I let myself go and got shoved around, the last two months of 2024 were some of the lowest times I’ve had in a while. That will not stand.
- I was definitely consistent with my mind and body this year in terms of reflecting and treating myself with respect, but this year I want to really look and feel my best. I want to lift more in the gym. I want to build endurance. I want to create a sustainable routine that I can maintain for a while, but that takes strength to start and keep up with week after week. I know I can do it!
I chose friendship because I wanted to refine one of my goals from two years ago. In 2023, one of my guiding words was CONNECTION and I really do feel like I accomplished that goal and continue to hit that goal. I have connected with thousands of people this year from all over the place, learning to love the short conversations I have with an Uber driver from all-day conferences and 14 hours of insurance-speak. But in the process of building that muscle, I’ve neglected something very key to my happiness: close friends.
I want to be able to not just build friendships, but maintain them. I tried a few times in 2024 and failed miserably, so I just got discouraged. Plain and simple. I have a few more thoughts on the topic that I’ll save for later in this reflection, but all in all, I think I am at the highest version of myself when I have good friends around me. This is a major priority and one that I am putting first this year.
Now, without further adieu, I have some things to discuss.
TURN YOUR BRAIN OFF
I’ve learned a lot about myself this year and one of the best things I could have possibly learned, especially so young, is how to shut my brain off.
Now, this sounds off but allow me to explain. When I first started truly reflecting and thinking about my place in the world, I would take these long walks, 3–4 hours at a time. I would listen to podcasts on enlightenment, talk to myself, record voice notes to send to mentors and friends, get on Facetime and spill whatever had been bugging me, but I was thinking. A lot.
I’m so extremely grateful for this period of my life, especially because the lockdown gave me a lot of extra freedom. I could work through my patterns and rationale, understand my behavior towards my loved ones, and felt truly at peace for the first time in a while. I owe a lot to these walks and I believe it gave me the confidence I needed to take leaps and, eventually, take a gap year that led to starting my company Faura.
I’m in a different period of my life now, a period of execution. I was able to create a framework for my life that worked and the last year or so has been about using that framework to create meaningful change, consistent change. But I found myself feeling stuck. I would have a problem and do what I always did — take a walk and think about it until it made sense to me. But eventually, those walks turned into mind-numbing thought exercises that had no bearing on reality. All of a sudden, I would come home angrier or more depressed than before, either because I had dug myself into a deeper hole instead of leaving a small problem alone or because I had convinced myself that there was a problem when there really wasn’t.
I truly believe that more people need to reflect and think hard about their mental framework, but the classic approach just wasn’t working for me anymore.
That is until I found ways to turn my brain off.
Whenever I started to feel burnt out, my dad would ask me the same question, “When was the last time you did something creative?” I would then sit on it and realize that I hadn’t done anything even remotely artsy for the last three months. The moment I started a complex project, whether it be painting my water bottle for six hours straight or working at a makerspace or bleach dying my jean jacket, it was like a grey cloud shriveled up above my head and poofed out of existence. In the third hour, which only really felt like 30 minutes, I would suddenly realize that I had been so concentrated on my project that I was no longer upset or sad or anything. I was neutral and at the end of the project, I was overjoyed at completing this new thing.
Earlier this year, I learned how to play poker. Our investors have poker nights once a month and at the first game, I was so embarrassed because I didn’t even know what the hands were. I still had to look at them on my phone. I had always thought poker was for a bunch of old guys at a bummy casino, super slow and uninteresting. But once I had gone through my $25 buy-in, I went and sat at the main table and my eyes lit up.
Not only was poker quick and involved, it was also social and witty — everything I loved in a good card game. That night, I downloaded a free poker app and started reading about poker theory. Within a few hours, I learned the hands and at the next event, which happened to be a poker tournament, I made it through more than half of the day!
Most recently, I went shooting with one of my dad’s good friends Steve. I remember shooting before and not really liking it, but I was a different person now. Not to toot my own horn or anything, but I’m pretty great at it. We shot everything from pistols to rifles and I was in the red the majority of the time. At the end of the day, I just absolutely loved it.
Now when you have a gun in your hand and it’s loaded, you really can’t be thinking about anything else but the target in front of you and making sure you’re following all the proper precautions. The same thing is true with poker — if you lose track of someone’s tell or aren’t paying attention to your cards, you lose. If I’m painting something that I use every day, like my headphones or water bottle, I want it to be something I really love looking at and that takes a massive amount of concentration. Believe it or not, all of these things give me the same brain break I really need to stay sane. It’s almost like “mindless thinking”.
One of my biggest pieces of advice for everyone this year is to find something that does this for you. I’m extremely lucky that I’ve found that in many things recently, but if you can find a way to shut off your brain for a little while, it will do you and my fellow overthinkers a world of good.
HORMONES
This year, I’ve really gotten in touch with my hormones.
“But I know everything there is to know about the female body!” said no one ever.
Feel free to skip this section if it doesn’t interest you. There are more juicy nuggets below. But for those who ARE interested, I think it’s quite fascinating.
A man and a woman operate on different hormone cycles. Where a man receives regular levels of estrogen and testosterone at similar times every day, women run on a 30 day cycle where hormones ebb and flow between high and low periods in line with fertility and menstruation. If you take hormonal birth control, these cycles get thrown all out of wack and can impact the physical and mental health of a woman in a ton of different ways. Women report feeling less attracted to their partners, having a period for two weeks in a row and then not a drop of blood for the next six months, debilitating cramps or intense strength and the willpower of Augustus Gloop in the chocolate factory.
When I was growing up, I would have normal teenage meltdowns and really intense feelings and my dad would ask me things like, “Are you about to start your period?” or “Are you sure you’re not just hormonal?” To a lot of people, that would seem completely inappropriate and straight-up rude. But in our house, this was a valid and extremely genuine question and it still is! I’m really glad I grew up with this idea that some of those wild feelings could actually be tamed simply by figuring out whether my body was just sabotaging me or not.
And this mentality hasn’t really changed a ton as I’ve gotten older. Now, I have to ask myself these questions instead of my dad always asking me, although I still lean on him for a ton of that support.
I’ve been on and off of birth control for the last few years, with travel getting in the way and being nomadic screwing up my cycle and where I could get access to the pill. I thought about getting something more permanent and decided that I liked the control that the pill gave me. I could simply choose to not change my hormone cycle for months and get back on a regular flow. Now THAT is powerful.
But in the process of learning about my body and how I react to birth control, I started to learn a lot more about the little habits I had and how quickly I could tell when my hormones were off. If I was in an internal meeting and found myself getting micro-manage-y, if I started feeling emotional for no reason, if I all of a sudden felt numb to everyday tasks instead of neutral: these were the first signs of hormonal imbalance.
Every woman needs to know this and know this well: your hormones make up who you are today and who the best version of yourself can be tomorrow. I can make choices every day that reflect my hormones, becoming sporadic and hard to be around and then soft and loving, OR I could choose to live life by my main principles knowing that my hormones can influence these things pretty massively, and learn to find ways to minimize the damage or roll with the punches. I’ve found that my work ethic doesn’t change too much, but my inner value and emotional tie to my work definitely do.
I want to end off this reflection with something a bit unrelated but still important to this topic of regulating your body:
You don’t have to feel some type of emotion with every action you take in life.
You can simply do things from a neutral point of view and minimize the feeling tied to it.
You don’t have to love working out. In fact, you could hate it most days of the week. But exercise doesn’t have to have emotion associated with it in the beginning. You can simply work out and go back to your regular life and not think about that activity with the negative ideas of pain and sweat and burn. I use this a lot when I exercise, but I’ve started to adopt the same principle in everyday life. I don’t have to love or hate updating my pipeline and doing follow-ups, but I do it and stay neutral and then I move on.
Now, don’t get me wrong, when this swings into the “numb” category as opposed to neutral, that could get in the way of getting back to one emotion or the other. The longer you stay in this category where nothing means anything instead of the indifference in emotion to that thing, the harder it is to pull yourself out of it. I felt that immensely this year and when I started feeling numb, it took a lot to recognize and bring myself out of the abyss.
TLDR; hormones can really fuck you up so try using the feeling of neutrality as a productivity super power.
AM I FAMOUS NOW?
I wanted to take this section to talk a bit about one of the craziest experiences that has ever happened to me this November and it all started with the Guidewire pitch competition. Guidewire is an insurance software provider and we won their competition in October at a conference out in Vegas. One of the prizes was that we got a free booth, travel, and concierge to and from the venue.
I had never had a driver standing outside waiting with a sign that said my name on it, but it was basically that.
I walked downstairs once I got off of the plane and received a text from a man named Matthew saying he was downstairs waiting for me. We spotted each other and he took my luggage and struck up a conversation. He mentioned that this was actually a super last-minute drive that he managed to pick up from someone whose car broke down but I was glad because he seemed really cool. Totally normal and I was enjoying his company when all of a sudden he started talking about how he saw my name and immediately thought of this wildfire company.
He asked, “You wouldn’t happen to be the Valkyrie who was doing a company for alternate containment? My brother was a firefighter so our family was always interested in new tech and I remember my mom was watching a podcast with this young girl who was doing things with vortex cannons. She was really impressed and thought they would do great things.”
It took a bit for my brain to calibrate everything he had just said and then I spoke, “Um, wait. Yeah, that’s me.”
“No way, really?”
I picked his brain a bit more. I thought Guidewire had told him a bit about me so he knew he got the right person, but this was Project Firefly, my old company from years ago in the suppression space. Did they make him do research or something? No, not at all.
So let me connect the dots here for a second:
Matthew, a driver in Nashville, Tennessee who just randomly happened to pick up my ride that I only got because I won a pitch competition a month back, just knew who I was because of Project Firefly. This completely one-off experience had led to this moment because a total stranger watched a podcast that I did when I was 18-years-old and had talked about me, all while I was completely unaware that this was happening: Matthew knew who I was because of my work just by chance.
That’s how far this has spread.
And that’s not even the end of it. Matthew has five siblings. Guess what his younger sister’s name is…
Valkyrie.
I shit you not, this was single-handedly the most serendipitous and absolutely ridiculous thing that has ever happened to me.
I genuinely can’t even wrap my brain around it. I called my dad later that night and he said, “Well, you’re famous now!” and I’d be lying if I didn’t feel like I was in that moment. Our message and work, coming from TWO YEARS AGO, had still stuck with this man and left a positive impression not just with him, but with his family.
That’s one of the coolest presents I ever could ask for.
FRIENDSHIP
Throughout the year, I’ve consistently asked myself this question: “What does it mean to be x age?”
When I was 18, I often wondered what it really meant to be 18, fresh young adult typically going to college or starting new somewhere. When I was 20, I pondered over what it was supposed to feel like at this awkward middle stage of legal adult and college senior. I wrote an essay about my reflections on the topic and my conclusion was simple: don’t think about it too hard.
At the time, I was feeling lonely and sad and wanted to find comfort in this idea that other people were feeling the same way, that being 20 meant feeling sad and lonely sometimes. I also realized that if I was focused on what it meant to “be 20” all the time, I would miss out on what being 20 actually meant to me. I would think about it all the time without truly being in the moment.
This brings me to 21: classic party age, wine nights and girls out, hasty decisions and stares across the dance floor. The fun and whimsical part of being a young person in New York City with an interesting life is extremely compelling, and a part of this just seems so juvenile, like having this much fun is a crime. And I’m not talking about drinking necessarily, more so the person you envision when you think “21, young and free.”
Something I’ve been realizing in uniting these two thoughts is one of my guiding words for the year: friendship.
My best friend Jesse came to visit me in New York in September last year. She only stayed for a few days, but that short period healed me for months afterward. Having a true friend to spend time with and laugh and cook and everything just made me feel light. I felt like a child having a sleepover again, like I really didn’t have a care in the world when we closed our laptops for the day and made little pumpkin cookies in the air fryer.
When I think about “being my age” in the context of feeling young and fresh and curious, my initial conclusion was that I shouldn’t really focus on it too much. But upon closer analysis, I realize that one of the biggest things that makes me “feel my age” is friends. I truly felt like I was just a 20-year-old girl living her best life in New York with her best friend. To be fair, I still don’t think these thoughts are going to take up much headspace moving forward, but just having this framework in my head that says, “You are more like yourself when you are with friends” is exactly what I need to “feel 21”.
DEAR MOM
Dear Mom,
You’ve been gone for almost two years now.
I knew this would be an important reflection for me to write because in the first year without you, every other thought was filled with sadness that I couldn’t see you anymore. This last year was a bit different, though, and I think it’s important to talk about it.
I don’t think about you the same way anymore. I used to think that the sadness and pain would never go away, and while I recognize that to be a naive thought, it just felt so unbelievable to me that someone would talk about their mom and I wouldn’t feel the need to excuse myself and cry in the bathroom for five minutes.
I almost think of you as an afterthought; something good or bad happens and I’ll think about how you would have reacted much later or I’ll recognize something and your face will pop up in my head, but it no longer haunts me the way it did before.
One of the most interesting things about your passing was the one-year anniversary of it. I knew it was going to be rough and I flew back home to be with family on the day. I cried in the morning and looked at pictures of you in the backyard and in the afternoon, we all went to the Peacock Park and walked around. We got Taco Bell afterward and watched a movie later in the day. And then something strange happened.
On the day after, it was like the clouds parted and the sun was finally shining through. A weight had been lifted off my shoulders, like the year mark was just one of the random tests you get in life and I had passed.
It was almost immediate. Suddenly, I would look at your pictures and still feel sad but more numb than anything. My emotions had dulled to a soft nub, with happiness slightly amplified when I watched videos. My first thought wasn’t always, “Oh, my mom is gone.” Now, I would watch videos or see pictures and just think, “My mom was so beautiful” or “That was a funny clip” and not think anything else of it. It’s a fact of life now: my mom is dead.
It’s been a long time since I’ve thought deeply about this, and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t crying thinking about you as I write this. None of this reflection diminishes any feelings I have about how much you meant to me or how much I love you or wish you could still be here watching me live my life, cheering me on from the sidelines like I know you would. There are quite a few moments that I wish I could ask you about or feel like I need answers that I’ll never get. You were still, largely, a mystery to me.
But I think, above it all, I’m just so grateful for the things I do have of you: the youtube videos dad posted of all of us when we were younger, the pictures and videos we all have on Snapchat with crazy filters, the photo albums. I’m growing from the pain of losing you and every day, I’m thankful that I have people around me that care about our family enough to keep coming around and helping out.
The last thing I’ll mention is this: you’ve traveled with me everywhere! I have a pendant where I keep a small piece of you inside of me, and you’ve been photographed on Time Square, the State Farm competition, Canada, Nashville, New York, Wisconsin, Texas — the list goes on! Every time I put my necklace on, I take a little piece of you with me everywhere I go. Dad gave me a little piece of him too (a little viking frog necklace, of course :)). I hope you’ve enjoyed the journey as much as I have, because we’re just getting started.
Sincerely,
Your eldest, Valkyrie ❤
CONCLUSION
I feel old.
The last few days have felt so magical. I had the best weekend with my boyfriend Som who came to Vegas to stay with me for a few days. We ate out, stayed in, watched our favorite shows, played our favorite games, went out for my first legal drink, and that’s really where a lot of this comes to a close.
I no longer feel any sense of anxiety walking into a bar. Why would I? If they ID me, there isn’t really anything stopping me any more. When I went into this week, I imagined I would just feel relieved about it, but there’s a part of me that feels less excited. Don’t get me wrong, I will absolutely have fun going out and partying and not having to worry and getting to buy wine as gifts for people (personal favorite of mine). I want to focus on just living that life for a while and not having to stay behind or get worried whenever someone asks about my age in a crowded room.
This is change and change is normal, as cliche as that sounds. I’m not special, but that means that I can relate to everyone, and I know there are a ton of people that will relate to this. This has been the most chaotic and rewarding year of my life and I feel so lucky that Som’s family has welcomed me into their lives, that my friends have allowed me to step into theirs, that my dad and sisters shower me with love, that I’m building the life that I’ve dreamed.
Feel free to play the My Little Pony theme song. I think we’ve all earned it as an outro to 2024.
