A mantra came to me today when I was working: you are earnest, not ironic.
I repeated it to myself to see where it took me and what it brought up.
What I heard?
Make mistakes. Embrace the failures. Keep the work moving. And, above all, do not diminish your voice to be palatable to others.
What do these platitudes look like in practice?Not pretty🤷♀️
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I come up against places in myself-- physically, emotionally, mentally, spiritually, energetically-- that are very hard boundaries. Places where I am pushed to my absolute limit and forced to ask really hard questions. Who am I? Am I good enough? Do people like me? Will they keep liking me if I show them who I really am? Same questions I've been asking since childhood. Such purity of heart and sweet honesty.
So a little behind the scenes reality...every single week we have customers spit out our food. For a variety of reasons-- texture, flavor, expectations, experience. Food reactions are so instinctual and gut based and having that visceral response right in your face is a humbling and mirroring experience. I have been known to laugh at the honesty of it (maybe appreciate, maybe uncomfortable). As counterintuitive as it seems, this is why I love the transactional relationship of the farmers market. We see hundreds of people each week. We meet people who love what we do and people who hate what we do. It's a tempering process and exposure therapy.
This business has taught me to not attach my worth to the opinions of my food. As much as I am my food, I am not my food! The food is not a bearing on whether or not people like me. Lifelong practice.
It's taking me years to untangle my personal value from my work. It's vulnerable, strange territory. I still come up against hard feelings all the time.
The spitting out of our food is one of the most honest responses. How? It has really taught me to keep making, keep putting MY vision out into the world, do not attach expectations to getting better or changing what we do to be liked or more marketable. Lesson: Do. You. Boo.
Want to be liked? Don't be a business owner. Want to work through issues toward this insane version of radical success? Be a business owner.