Here I am and there it goes again.
Here I am thinking about starting 5 new projects (businesses?) and there goes my eyesight continuing to degenerate, again. Here I am again wanting to start doing the work I want to do myself before learning the ropes, instead of hoping to find an employer who will accommodate me. Here I am feeling empowered to reinvent some wheels and make up my own rules, again. The timing isn’t a coincidence.
As I’m writing this, I have a few other tabs open— a Chat GPT thread where I’m brainstorming creative marketing case studies, a Google Sheet where I’m compiling a database of all the places in BCN~Europe that host nomadic cooks, the Wikipedia for a Spanish film director, and Deepl.com. What is she working on?
The truth is I’m not sure yet, but I won’t know until I start, so I’m starting. I’m taking a card from the same book I used to write my life when I was 22, fresh out of college, lost about how to be an adult with an invisible disability. As I moped around my childhood bedroom, unemployed, lamenting about all the jobs I couldn’t do or get to, I started a project (a music blog). And then 5-20 more (event production, tour booking, music PR, my own band, house shows, backyard shows, a pizza catering business, etcccc)
I started doing the work I was pulled to do, in my own way, with fonts as large as I felt like making them, at locations I felt like planning them in, not out of sheer creativity or determination, but because I had to (the Aries in my moon did help, probably). Without enough clarity or direction, I was either going to keep starting and quitting jobs I wasn’t fit for, or I was going to figure out how to do things my way.
You get super creative, living with an invisible disability. You look around and notice most things aren’t going to work for you, so you start making up your own rules.
So once again, I’m unemployed for the umpteenth time and filled with an intense pull to keep moving forward. The difference between the words I’m writing now and the pages I wrote when I was 22 is the decade of experience that separates us —the decade of trials and errors, triumphs and failures, forgotten ideas, and fully produced projects.
Every project that survived and thrived taught me the same things:
•When I do it myself I get to create the systems that work for me .
•Not every project needs to be a business, but every project should hold a unique place in my life— passion, income, community, etc.
•Everything is figure-out-able— and mostly begins with a single email.
•I can’t do anything alone— and I no longer want to.
These statements are truer now more than ever as the wheels in my gears begin to turn again, faster and sharper than before. As I find the same adrenaline I felt when was 22, a few months shy of 32, while living on a new continent, in a country where I’m a beginner speaker, and after the past few years of deep work, these are the north stars that will guide me.
Shab you are so cool, so creative and determined. I enjoy reading about your life!