A year ago, I took a solo road trip from my home in California to Austin, Texas to watch the solar eclipse. I booked the trip a few months prior as motivation and a reward for relaunching my business. After three years of healing full-time and a year of housing drama, I was finally healthy and in a good living situation. I was hard at work on a business plan to relaunch Sister.
Before getting sick, I had a thriving, profitable company, with consistent revenue and well developed product lines, including the highly successful Feminist Business School. I was determined to pick up where I’d left off.
But, despite working on my business relaunch for hours each day, I couldn’t get much traction. I was second-guessing myself constantly and unable to commit to one idea. I was desperate to generate revenue, but I kept getting tangled in the trauma triggers I didn’t realize were enmeshed in my business. After a couple of months, I found myself in the familiar position of spending my days attending to my CPTSD and regulating my nervous system instead of working on my business. I became fearful of recreating a company that would contribute to making me sick again. I was at cross-purposes and going nowhere fast.
In the weeks before the eclipse, I contemplated cancelling the journey. I had brazenly booked the trip on credit cards, confident that cash would be flowing soon. As the trip approached, betting on myself looked increasingly foolish. By the time my departure date rolled around, my business was still non-operational but I decided to go anyhow. I told my healer, “I have no idea why I’m going, it doesn’t make any sense. Financially, it’s a terrible idea. But, I feel like it’s something I need to do.”