Start

Start looks like a weird word all by itself. It is usually accompanied by concrete action words. Start running. Start cleaning. Start over. Start all by itself allows the brain to jump to much deeper meanings. Start living, start doing, start believing. It can be powerful, game changing. But often times it is plain overwhelming.

Starting over in a new city. Starting the first year of marriage. Starting in general. The amount of energy that you even have to build up just to start anything can be a lot of work. It took me years to finally start a business I dreamed about since I was 10 years old. Start. When it’s so much easier to just stop. Lay down. Forget it.

Lately I’ve been caught up in getting my business started, measuring my success by the amount of likes, followers & shares that I get. It’s been harder than any other job I’ve had. I think entrepreneurship and startups have this sense of whimsy around them, this idea that being your own boss is easy and you can finally create this business you’ve only dreamed of. While it does have its perks there is a overwhelming sense of loneliness at the start of it all. I’ve read around and found there is a resounding struggle throughout the entrepreneur community, this feeling of failure due to comparison, feeling like your failing yourself as a boss. I will say it feels much better to fail a boss you don’t care about than to fail yourself.

So it brings me back to why I started a business at all. Was it to build the worlds largest twitter following? To gain thousands of likes on my super filtered super fake Instagram pics? To have the worlds best Facebook business page? No. No. And nooo. I started this business to reach people hoping to be creative, struggling with creativity, or just creatives looking for a place to belong. I started this business to build community and reach out to people in my neighborhood, to have a laid back environment to talk about issues happening in the community. I started the floral design part of my business to have a beautiful tangible product that people can physically understand as a form of my creativity. I started because it’s a part of me that needs to be heard, that was unfulfilled by 9-5 desk jobs, assistant tasks, working under managers too full of themselves to listen.

So maybe the community building part is going to take a lot longer than I thought. It may take years to build a client base to start designing florals consistently. I will beat myself up as a boss, and then learn to go a bit easier on myself. All I know is I started a business to put my love for creativity out into the world and I don’t believe any amount of social media likes or clients could empower me in the way that does.

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