Adventure storytelling: Interview with tegan phillips
This week’s interview is with endurance cyclist, speaker, and cartoonist Tegan Phillips. I came across Tegan’s work online and loved the way she combined her passion for cycling with cartooning by creating comics that told the story of the cycling adventures she was taking around the world. She reminded me that there is a way to create meaningful lives and work that represent all of who we are. I hope you find as much inspiration from her story as I did and highly recommend giving her a follow on instagram !
In the interview, I spoke to her about:
What it was like to stop studying to be a lawyer and pursue cartooning and cycling as a career
The lessons she’s learned from cycling
Navigating “sexy courage” and “unsexy courage”
Enabling head and heart to work together
What are you up to in life right now?
I’m living in Spain and working at the Rocacorba Cycling Hotel. It’s this really luxurious heaven that is like a big old house just outside of Girona. I work in the evenings waitressing, sometimes making beds, really whatever they need. During the day, I go out cycling, running, go to the lake and build my brand/business which I’ve been building my business for the past decade. I feel like I’ve stumbled into this tiny bit of paradise.
Before you started your business, you were studying to be a lawyer. What led you down the path of pursuing cartooning and cycling?
I really, really enjoyed law a lot. It’s a really interesting field to be in and requires a lot of creativity and problem solving and it could have been really fun. But I did a short internship for a big corporate firm and even though it was really fun, I kept trying to see what my life would be like after doing that for 10 or 20 years. It just didn’t seem like something that I would get a lot of deep satisfaction from. I wasn’t sure about the impact it would have on the world and the lifestyle didn’t really appeal to me in terms of not really getting a lot of fresh air and sunlight. It would have been fun moment to moment but when you stand back and reflect on how you are spending your time, I could see that I wasn’t going to be very fulfilled doing that.
My internship ended on a Friday and that Sunday my family set off on this one year bicycle adventure. I’d gotten into bike touring a few months before on a holiday from university. I was drawn out of some colleagues to win a bicycle and go on an adventure which was actually in Spain, not so far away from where I am now. On the Spanish bike trip, I started this cartoon blog. Then on the Africa trip that I did with my family for a year, cycling from Cape Town to Kenya and back, I kept the comic blog going.
Something I always want to stress to people is I started that and it ended up being my career, but when I started I was really bad. It was terrible. I think we have this story in the world of “oh, some people just have this talent. You have to be really good.” I don’t know how good I am now but I am definitely better than when I started. I think you can have a passion and pursue that passion without having to be very good or talented. If it’s something you really enjoy and you can see that it does add some value to people then it could be a job.
After that trip, my parents were actually the ones that encouraged me to not go back and study law and focus on my comics. They said they would support me for another year to see if I could make a living from doing comics and that’s what I did.
What was that year like when you decided to focus on comics?
It was stressful to be honest. It was completely self-inflicted pressure. My parents never ever made me feel like “okay, time is going by and you need to make it.” They were realistic and it wasn’t like they would support me for twenty years no matter what if it wasn’t working, but they never put pressure on me to make it work. I put a lot of pressure on myself. I was probably more stressed out then than if I had gone into corporate. At least in a job setting they tell you what to do. I really liked school because they would effectively tell you, “this is the task. Do three tasks this week and if you finish better than everyone else then we will make you feel good about yourself and that’s enough.” I had to start figuring out on my own “how much is enough? How much is too much?” I just had this feeling that I was never doing enough and I had no idea what I was doing. I was the teacher and the student and everything else at the same time. It was really hard.
I was trying to combine the cycling and the comics and would just read so many blogs and websites, whatever I could find about how people made a living from these various things. There was a lot of imitating other people’s styles and business models and just trying to test everything and see. It was a bit harder being in South Africa because there was less money in it and less resources than exist internationally. There were all these elements that made it challenging but it was also a really fun time because I was learning a lot and learning is always fun.
You’re still doing it! Was there ever a breakthrough you had that made it less stressful or gave you a different way to approach the uncertainty and unconventional path?
In the last four years, I did get to a point where I couldn’t really describe my job but I was making enough money between comics clients and talks that I knew I could support myself. I could say, “There is something happening here.”
But I would say the biggest breakthrough was this. For two years, I spent all of my time gearing up to do this Africa trip where I was trying to set a record for cycling across Africa. During that time, I wasn’t sure what I would do after. We had a lot of plans for talks and a documentary. But then this year in June and July I went and followed the route of the women’s Tour de France. I was doing storytelling on instagram and making videos about what the route would be like. I think my biggest breakthrough was realizing, “I know what my brand is.” It's women’s cycling and a very specific type of women. These quirky, smart, weird women who like to ride bikes and go on adventures. It’s a group that I love so much. I love making things for them whether it's merchandise or talks or instagram content. I realized this is my specific, niche area. Up until now, I’ve been keeping things very open to try and add value to lots of different people in lots of different ways. Now I’m just going to pick my one group. It’s the people that I really identify with. I decided I’m going to make things I want to exist and if I like them, I know these girls will also like them and that’s enough.
Since then it’s been nice to get more focused. Being able to commit is the biggest breakthrough but it took a long time to get to this point of realizing what I’m really passionate about.
What mentalities do you think you’ve learned from cycling that have translated into the bigger picture of their life?
There have been so many times where I've been on a bike and really believed that I physically could not keep going. One thing that really stands out is this 500 kilometer race where I got into an argument with the race organizer because there was no women's prize money. He ended up inviting me out and I got a sponsorship to go do the race. I was the only woman doing it and it was a big race. My bike didn’t arrive until late into the night right before the race started at 4:00am. I didn’t get any sleep and the race was at altitude. I was about 350 kilometers in and I was starting to feel quite tired and had a bad crash. I was bleeding and it was pouring rain. There was a big lightning storm and then it got dark. We were riding really fast and I was with this group. My body was not just at its limit, it was past its limit by this point. But I didn’t have an option. If I stopped and lost the group then I would be even more screwed. Mentally I felt like there was no way to keep going. I was thinking, “I’m tired and it’s pouring rain and I’m terrified because there is lighting everywhere.” But because I couldn’t stop, I was able to see how much was possible when I was forced to keep going.
It was the same in Africa when I was doing cycle touring and would just think, “I can't cycle any further.” We’d be on the side of the road and if we didn’t keep going, it would mean having to sleep there. Just being able to learn that the mind will say you can’t and that your mind is not always right gets you into the habit of challenging beliefs about what you can and can’t do and what’s possible for you.
I loved your TED Talk, “The Funny Thing about Courage” where you spoke about what you call “sexy courage” and “unsexy courage.” You spoke about leaving to go on cycling adventures as what gets recognized as “sexy courage.” For you, choosing to not go on another adventure and staying home to pursue your passion of becoming a full time cartoonist was the braver choice for you, the “unsexy courage.” To use your words, “The funny thing about courage is that sometimes the smallest, least sexy acts are the ones that bring the deepest sense of fulfillment.” Are there other moments in the years since where you’ve made the choice to choose “unsexy courage?”
One thing that was really hard for me was coming back from Egypt. When I was doing this record attempt on the second day I got really ill and was unresponsive for 24 hours. It was very scary for everyone. I spent a few days in the hospital and afterwards I felt like I wanted to carry on because I had spent so much time and people had given so much money to make the trip possible. We got medical advice that said, “No, you need to go back and do tests because we don’t know why this happened and it could happen again.” Going back and having to make a series of decisions over the next few weeks and months about when to go back (while having to say no to some really cool races) was really hard. I was feeling like people would perceive me as being weak and scared.
I had a lot of conversations with people who said, “you just need to get over this. It’s not so bad, you just need to get back in the saddle.” I had to decide for myself, “Am I being paranoid or would it be irresponsible to go do this and put myself at risk?” Making these decisions and trying to not let ego sway things too much either way was hard when there were conflicting fears. There was the fear of dying, the fear of appearing weak, the fear of letting people down. I’ve really learned that it's not often so clear cut. There’s not just one option that is sexy and one option that is unsexy, there are elements of fear and elements of true love and passion in every path. Trying to figure out what the ratio is is tough: Which one is more fear based? Which one is based on what’s true and right for me? It’s hard to make these decisions and I have a lot of respect for people who put a lot of energy into trying to make the best choice or the most authentic choice for them. It’s easier to do the thing that will look the best or impress the most people.
In your TED Talk you also spoke about head and heart. You have a history of choosing from heart. What advice would you give people that feel stuck in their head and want to choose from heart for maybe the first time?
I think it's interesting the way that we perceive the divide of head and heart. The heart feeling is really important but I think our head can be used to support the heart or block out those feelings. It's almost like not perceiving it in a way where your brain is saying something and your heart is saying something and you pick one or the other. It's more like trying to identify if your heart is saying something and your head doesn't agree with it. A really useful habit to get into is figuring out what that blockage is and trying to unpack the mental resistance to that thing that your heart is telling you. It’s often just fear that it won’t be practical or people will judge you. I think the goal is being able to get to a point where you can get head and heart to meet in a way where it doesn’t feel like choosing and instead you've brought everything into alignment. It comes down to self inquiry and being really honest with yourself. Why am I feeling like that honestly? Do I really believe that I'm never going to have any money? Do I really believe that reason?
What’s next for you?
It’s a surprise for me! I’ve spent so much of the last ten years being on the move. Every few months I've lived in a new place for a long time now. It has been fun and interesting and exciting and I’ve met the most wonderful people but I’m also exhausted. It was important to go through that to learn what I like and what I don’t like and what's out there. It's much easier to commit to something when you feel like you've tried it all. I now feel ready to commit to staying in one place for a while. I’m planning to stay in Spain, hopefully at Rocacorba, for the next year and potentially for many years and just build my brand from here and do a lot of traveling with this as a base. That is the dream at the moment.
