Continuing to look back and seeing the present unfolding:
Fast forward again, I am now living in New York. My kids are in their 20’s now and away at university, grown and gone, and I am an empty nester and deeply peri-menopausal. I am also living in a place with no friends or community close by; its covid time and I have nothing but social media to rely on to grow my business. But oh wait, I have to shut everything down as I wait for a Green Card!
After over 20 years of hustling, growing, being creative, writing courses and workshops, teaching and offering it all up online: I had come to an abrupt and full stop.
To say I was uncomfortable would be an understatement!
But it’s a slow descent into creative burnout, one that I did not realize was happening to me until it was in my face…
The pressure that I put on myself to keep posting to Instagram while I waited for my green card was intense and I felt like a failure daily for not posting because I equated posting with keeping my business alive, it was like oxygen and I was convinced that if I stopped posting my business would somehow become irrelevant and disappear…
And all the while the algorithm was changing and confirming my worst fears, that I would no longer be seen if I did not keep up with the fast pace..if I did not hustle harder and faster!
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At this point, Instagram added reels to their platform and then decided that if folks were not posting to reels then they would not be seen, and so I tried, I really did and even managed to make a few wonderfully creative things, but over the past two years my creativity has suffered deeply…
So while I could see some of my colleges finding their voices and moving their platforms online as a response to covid that were successful, wonderful, and perfect for them, my voice was slowly shriveling up, my creativity dry, and my sense of self confused as I found that I could not find the energy to respond to the new and faster pace required to keep up.
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I was hitting a wall with regards to my website development skills and could no longer build my own website the way I wanted it to look and it was no longer a fun and creative pursuit for me, it was frustrating and upsetting.
All this while confronting head-on in a deeper way than ever before, my own participation in the patriarchal, capitalist, colonizing over-culture as a cis-gendered white woman now living in the USA, and hustle-culture was being shown to me as a deep-seated part of my own colonized ways, one that I myself have been benefiting from alongside my white privilege for a long time, and to be honest I was done!
Being online is a different beast than it was when I started out 20 years ago, I no longer recognized myself in relation to it, I no longer wanted to participate in the hustle, but had no idea how to break free. The addiction is strong!
My spiritual life and creative life are deeply entwined, they are both expressions of who I am, but posting about the deeper aspects of my spiritual life has always been a private one for me, something that hustle and social media culture can not share. Added to this, the initiation of menopause has been showing me how to slow down in a different way, so that I can show up to myself.
True spiritual unfolding is slow, messy, and painful even, as we navigate our shadow selves, work on our healing, and unfold into who and what we have shown up in this lifetime to be. It’s not something remotely shareable on social media, and this has long been the crux of my confusion.
How do I “market” my business which essentially is a mix of spiritual and creative offerings in such a way that they are authentic and true to my heart, but also get the word out there?
How do I hustle while also being slow, deliberate, and authentic to my soul?
For many years now I have been walking the line thinking that these questions were actually figure-out-able! They are not.
So today as I finish up writing this post I am on day seven of a social media detox, and I am refusing to hustle.
When 2023 hit, I found myself in what my creative soul considers “purgatory”, I found myself without inspiration.
I usually like to choose a word for the year and I had nothing.
I usually like to envision out new projects and ideas for the year ahead-and nothing.
So I waited and continued scrolling through Instagram looking for inspiration (Facebook having long been abandoned many years ago), and tortured myself for not having anything to say or post online.
Which: truth be told, is old news, as it’s been a few years now of this deep internal struggle.
Since the new year, I have been sitting quietly and looking for the voice inside of me, the one that has been asking me for a long time to slow down, to listen…
When I reached her, she told me what I have known for a long time now, but had been ignoring for fear that with the pace of the world today I would simply spin too far away from the axis and disappear, if I changed how I did things, if I slowed down…
She is asking me to simply step away from the game, from a hustle culture that requires me to post on social media all of my comings and goings, and to just simply be with my art, with myself, my guides, and to go back to the beginning and start again.
Was I surprised, not really.
The plant medicines have been telling me, my guides have been telling me and my own inner voice has been yelling for some time now to come back to stillness, to settle, to sit.
It is my hope that through listening again I will find my authentic creative passion again, but this time I need to do it slowly, intentionally, and mindfully.
This time I am not in my 20s and 30s with little kids at home, this time I am deep within the initiation of menopause, and her grip on me is relentless…
So while I have some new offerings waiting on the sidelines for me, I want to come at them with deep intention, with no rush to “Launch” and if I do share on social media it will be with a sense of slow deliberation, softness, and authenticity.
All of my offerings are still available, but I will not be “pushing” them, marketing them, or hustling to get them noticed.
For now, my focus will steer away from social media and be more on my newsletters and this blog.
It will be more about the gentle unfolding in a fast-paced and collapsing world as we all push up against it and find our own way to stillness.
I am starting again with myself, with my voice, with the land and spirits of place, and if you would like to join me, I am here, quietly though this time…
If you are interested in hearing more about my journey I will be sharing it here on this blog, and at some point when I go back to Instagram, I will be sharing there again too, through the creative medium of beautiful images, musings and quotes, but only when the creative muse finds me, and not because I feel pressure to do so… let’s see how this all goes, the adventure awaits and I am up for it-breaking social normative rules has always been my thing anyways.
