It’s funny how easy it is to share advice to help others, and it’s also funny how easy it is to ignore the advice yourself. I’ve spent hours dishing out lesson after lesson to my children about how to overcome a hundred and one different emotional situations, but yet, here I am procrastinating and self-doubting my way out of having to pursue something that I am truly passionate about but that scares the living shit out of me - this website, its content and where I can see it going. I’m frozen.
What if?
So what do I tell myself in this situation? My words of encouragement are apparently only reserved for everybody else but me and all I can hear is: “I am a designer, not a writer. I can’t make anything out of this, especially not money, so why even bother putting in any effort? I’ll only be wasting my time and I’ll probably just give up in the end so I might as well throw in the towel now.”
That is a whole lot of self-deprecating nonsense. You know it, I know it, yet when we utter these words to ourselves, it’s our truth. I held on to those words as my truth and even as I am writing this, they keep coming back, louder each time. Every time I muster up the courage to write, the blank page threatens my already shaky confidence. I don’t get it - this blank page is the exact same blank page I faced every day as a graphic designer but somehow it feels different. The blinking cursor that now taunts me is a reminder of each second that passes by that I am not moving towards my goal. I try to push through yet panic, fear and doubt run through me with every word that I type. The voice gets louder and more vicious this time. “You’re useless at this! No one cares about you and what goes on in your life so why would they want to read this crap?” Ouch. I know.
Every single one of my instincts during this process is telling me to retreat but a deep-seeded curiosity that I carry around with me is telling me the exact opposite. That curiosity is getting so familiar - it’s what has gotten me to challenge my comfort zone on more than one occasion and more importantly it’s what has guided me to put myself first, which I, as a people-pleaser, never do. By putting myself first, I find myself really analyzing what it is that I truly want. As a mother, wife, daughter, employee, we all know these roles have blind spots where it’s virtually impossible to see what we need to do in order to be true to ourselves. It’s really hard, but that doesn’t mean it’s impossible. Every single time I’ve opened myself up to it, it has never disappointed me. In fact, it’s made me live the most transformative experiences of my life to date. Over the years, I’ve discovered that all I need to do to avoid the self-sabotage traps I am constantly setting is to simply repeat these two words to myself. Two words! It’s magic.
“What if?”
What if I just wrote a few sentences on a page? What if I just designed the logo? What if I just put together a web page? What if I continued this thought and wrote even more?
These two words instantly release the pressure I put on myself and ward off that cruel voice. I no longer feel the intense overwhelm of everything involved in making this dream happen, and instead I’ve broken it down into one small challenge after another that I can really get excited about. Compounded, these challenges end up building my dream of making Kurrants a reality. I am now capable of concentrating on the vision I have for this platform and I am holding on to that as tightly as I can. I am now capable of making this dream happen and what excites me the most is when I think about what it could mean to my children when they see it and hopefully what it could mean to others as well. I want Kurrants to be a success and by that, I mean I want it to help people, in any way that it can, and if that ends up happening, then I know every struggle getting here will be worth it.