This morning I woke up groggy, stirred from another insanely vivid dream: this time I’m in my house fighting off a snow leopard with my own two hands. It’s my job to administer acupuncture to this animal. There’s a panther too, but it’s sleek, docile and beautiful, with alarming green eyes. I want to interact with this gorgeous panther, to give it acupuncture instead of this resistant, feisty leopard. But if I release my clamped hands from its jaw, it’s bound to break skin. So I hold on tight. There are long acupuncture needles flying everywhere as the leopard thrashes about. Then I wake up.
I decided to start keeping a dream journal today.
Don’t worry, this blog isn’t going to be it. I just thought I’d share this crazy snippet, because most of my dreams lately have really been about goals, fears, and instincts, of which I have many these days.
Goals for my business, for the summer, for today.
Fear about where I’m going in the next year and what I’m going to do when I get there.
My instincts have been harder to read, simmering just below the surface. I’m a girl who follows her gut. That gut instinct becomes harder to feel when we’re thrust from the conveyor belt of school and into the real world. Every decision becomes ours, the possibilities are limitless: wonderful, right? Terrifying.
I’ll say it: Business has been painfully slow. Perhaps that’s an overshare—I’m supposed to stay professional here. This blog is the storefront of my business, but it’s hard to stay on the up-and-up all the time.
I’m more than just a business, I’m a small local business, and I’m human. It’s hard to watch other fledgling businesses fill up their summer calendars and not turn a bit green with envy. I’m no stranger to the low-and-slow method; that’s the only way to build a sustainable business. But it’s hard to watch June tick by with an empty inbox and a silent phone.
Everyday I’m racking my brain for better marketing ideas, but word of mouth is my holy grail, it seems. I can’t think of a better method.
The moral of my brief foray into Deeply Personal Land: it often takes more than talent and a strong foundation–it also takes a little dose of magic, luck, kismet, whatever you call it. This isn’t some wishy-washy thing that I’m sitting around waiting for—I’ll be overturning rocks each day until I find it.
