5. Can You Help Me With My Taxes?

Hello Friends,

Someone recently asked me what the best month is. I think most people are inclined to say the month that they were born, because humans are funny and vain like that. But when I thought about it, I realized that my favorite month is actually March. Weather that starts to look more like Spring, a seemingly-endless slew of college basketball and people who pick teams based on mascots destroying your meticulously crafted bracket, and the return of the dangerously delicious and unhealthy Shamrock Shakes at Mickey D’s. This year, March also marks the return from my publishing hiatus.

For those of you who are blissfully unaware, January through February is a special time for accountants. It’s the time where we strap on our pocket protectors, put new batteries into our calculators, and prepare for the inevitable Vitamin-D deficiency that comes from spending endless hours in a windowless audit room. 

This time is affectionately known in our industry as “Busy Season”. Most companies are preparing to share their financial information with the public around this time, and so they enlist the help of auditors to check that their information is accurate and complete. There’s a little more to it, but for the sake of my blog ratings, I won’t go into more details. The best comparison I can think of for Busy Season is that it’s like college finals season, except that it’s 10 weeks long, and the Company doesn’t bring cute puppies out to the quad for stress relief.

I want to take this time to quickly answer a few of the questions that come up a lot when I talk about my job - yes I’m an auditor, no I don’t work for the scary IRS, yes I can hopefully help answer your tax questions (but I’ll probably just Google them), and no I didn’t have dreams of being an accountant growing up. Don’t get me wrong, I’m really excited for the career path that lies ahead. But when you grow up wanting to be a spy, or a professional baseball player if the whole spy thing doesn’t work out, it can sometimes be tough telling people you’re “just” an accountant. I’m pretty sure that was widely regarded as the worst career card in Hasbro’s: The Game of Life. But we’ll tackle “Finding a career that makes your heart soar” in a later post. This post is about loneliness.

When I left college, I felt ready to take on the real world. I had survived 4 Northern Indiana winters, made it through 8 finals weeks, and overcome 2 separate cases of “the plague”. I learned how to prepare for interviews, how to budget and save for retirement, and how to eat French Toast Crunch for breakfast 7 days a week. What couldn’t I do?

But one thing that I’ve never really had to learn is how to be alone. For many people, being alone feels incredibly natural. These are the people who love having their own room, who crave those moments of solitude in the car, and who enjoy the peace and quiet that comes when their nights and weekends aren’t always packed with SYRs/game nights/Hall Council/rehearsals/family dinners/basketball practice/everything else that has previously demanded my time. As has become increasingly clear to me, I am not this kind of person.

For the first time, I’ve been experiencing this unfamiliar feeling of loneliness. I think one of the reasons is that for my entire life up to this point, I’ve shared a room with someone. This is pretty ironic, since I grew up dreaming of having my own room. No more rattling bunk bed every time Justin moved around at night, no more 5:30AM alarms from “On-the-Grind Millay”, and no more random people coming into my room to play 2K16 while I tried to study for Econ (you know who you are). Now, I realize how much I actually loved those moments of human connection.

That being said, the loneliness of this season is not the loneliness that comes from not having any human interaction at all, but more the kind of loneliness that comes from not being surrounded by people that are constantly pouring into my life. I live, work, and interact with fantastic people each day, but I haven’t had a lot of success finding my crew out here yet. I know it's still early, but patience with this sort of thing is not a virtue that I possess.

Even though I believe it’s deeply rooted in who I am, this desire for consistency, intentionality and depth in friendships has made this season pretty lonely, as I’ve transitioned from a place where such relationships were abundant, to a place where these relationships need to be cultivated all over again. When you’re in a region like Silicon Valley where the priority for most is work, wealth, and innovation, it can be hard to find those individuals who are also committed to the concept of “finding your people”. Not only that, but it can be hard getting people together when not everyone is a hallway/10-minute walk away.

I have also realized that my extroverted tendencies have taught me to believe that spending more time alone means spending more time being lonely, which simply isn’t true. I’ve long tried to avoid “alone-time”, but I think I’m being taught a lesson in this season to embrace it. So while I do have confidence that I will make some incredible friends out here, I’m also learning how to find joy in the moments of peace and solitude, away from the raucous dinner parties and board game nights. Not an easy lesson for me, but we’re getting there.

Given that we’re already 16.7% of the way through 2019, I thought I’d offer a quick update on resolutions. I’ve loved the practice of writing in a daily gratitude journal, and have even gotten back into playing piano and writing music. If you’ve got suggestions for song topics (or more importantly, song titles), hit me up. On a more terrifying note, I run a Spartan Race in about 3 weeks, for which I will be hilariously unprepared. I blame that partially on the fact that I threw out my back trying to keep up with Resolution #7 (touch my toes), but the unseasonal California rain storms haven’t helped. And my goal of reading 30 books looks ambitious considering I’m through 2 in 2 months, but like I said before, it’s early. Above all, I'm trying to keep my college mantra in my head as this season of life flies by: “Choose Joy”. Even if your champion loses on day one of March Madness… 

Warmly,
Danny