So, today (well, yesterday now that it’s past midnight) was the day I set for my site to launch. I was… am… terrified where this will lead me. I sat around all of yesterday and today and didn’t touch my computer. I am paralyzed with the idea of what I have set out to do. But, it’s here now. It would be silly to take steps backward now.
I’ve taken courses that mentioned “imposter syndrome” and I didn’t quite relate to the idea until I took my first real steps. I admitted this to my husband yesterday. I now feel like a true imposter. I feel it nagging at my whole presence in this online space. The more I thought about it, the more I realized: I didn’t feel it before, because I had been hiding in my “safe space”. I wasn’t putting myself out there. I wasn’t claiming to be an artist with my whole being. I was avoiding the responsibility of this claim. Before this I had so many excuses: it was just a “hobby”, just something that I practiced when I had the energy and time, it was a work in progress, an idea that I was half-heartedly developing into a business with which I could someday support my family. I rarely, if ever, posted on my Instagram account because I had no accountability to this idea as a business.
This step – putting my work officially into a website and creating an online school – feels like I’ve thrown myself head-first down the rabbit hole. And, now I’m finding myself chasing the white rabbit through wonderland. I don’t know where each turn will take me. I don’t know if I will naively make the wrong choice – will I grow, or shrink into invisibility?
Well, here I go, friends. Writing this first post gave me an idea. I know absolutely nothing about creating an online business. Yes, I’ve seen some of those “free” lead magnet courses. There are so many successful online entrepreneurs out there that have released “how to start your online business” courses. I may even have a few very basic ones in my courses library… yes, that long list of online classes that I will eventually make time to watch. (Maybe it’s ignorant of me not to watch them first, but I just can’t seem to get a handle on the very, very beginning. Plus, because I don’t know how to start, I just kept putting off starting!) Watching someone start from scratch, though? I can’t seem to find a single one of their very successful websites broadcasting the very beginning of their adventure. Not in detail, at least. Yes, they say it. Yes, they give a great and inspirational summary. Yes, they can give you the shortcuts and all of the info. But day one? Month two? No, maybe that’s too boring for most people to read. So, they very wisely display all of their beautiful, hard earned, successful glory all over their websites. That is why they all have to state “I am, like all successful entrepreneurs, not an overnight success. It took me a lot of hard work, and years to get here.” Because it’s no longer visible in who they are online. It’s almost like they’ve forgotten how hard it was at the very beginning and they’ve left out all of the tiny baby steps they needed to take before they got to those “shortcuts”. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t begrudge them this, not at all. This is beautiful to me. It’s what I, too, strive for. Autonomy from the structure of this broken system of work-for-an-eventual-life? I love that I’m seeing so many strong men and women, putting themselves out there and creating the lives that they’ve always dreamed of.
But, maybe I’ll be different from them in that, I will lay my whole journey out here for you to see. All of the ugly stumbling that I will have to do to get to the first big milestone of my online business. That milestone that makes a noteworthy “aha! moment”. And then everything that it takes to get to the next milestone, and the next.
It may create for me an imaginary accountability, too. At least at first. (I hope that maybe someday I’ll have an audience to whom I’ll actually be accountable.) It will keep me going day to day. Thinking of you out there. Someone who is reading this and cheering me on. 🙂 Someone who learns like me: slowly, step by step, piece by piece. You, who need encouragement to take that leap and believe in yourself – and might actually do it if you can see that someone, like you, started as a scared, normal person, with nothing in the beginning, for whom excess time is a luxury (I work a full time, dead-end job, have two kids, and a husband that currently works upwards of 65-80hrs a week in the culinary industry), & has no money to waste.
This will be my promise to you, if you are reading this kind of blog that I am starting: I am not going to give up. I will be a successful online entrepreneur of some sort, someday. If you want to know what I did last week, last month, last year, to get to this point… this first, very basic post… maybe you can do it faster than me: I worked up the courage to believe in myself and do more than wait for things to start happening. I finally decided to make them happen. I made lists, I Googled, I practiced… but then I kept going in circles… until this week. I purchased a domain, an account on a teaching website, and started forging forward.
I wrote the quote above a couple months ago, just to play with this discontinued Jacquard ink that I finally hunted down (it took me months to find it after falling in love with the colors in a post of someone writing with it!)
But, it’s so applicable to how I feel now. I definitely don’t see the whole staircase. I just know it’s the top that I want to reach. Taking that first step was so, so vital for me because once I did, I knew: the feeling of fear could have made me turn tail and run, but knowing that fear, feeling the reality of it, I now know my life before it had me walking around in a lifeless haze like a zombie, no control over the direction of my life, just running where I’d find my next meal.
If I’m not feeling that fear, I’m playing it too safe and I’ll never be more than I was yesterday. It’s like taking the red pill … Hey, maybe that will be the next quote I write. 🙂
Cheers! To all those that read this and still want to follow my blog! 🙂
the Long N Winding Word 