In the midst of an epochal transition, feminist failure has a valuable function.
If you’re an experienced feminist entrepreneur living in the U.S., there’s a good chance you’re feeling like a failure. If I had to guess: nothing seems to be working right now. The systems, strategies, and processes that you have relied on in your business for years are no longer getting results. Social media posts and emails no longer land like they used to. Sales are slumping, customers are disconnected, and your enthusiasm is at an all time low. You’re losing money or hustling harder than ever to keep your revenue streams steady.
Maybe you rallied your business through COVID by sheer force of will and six years later are feeling burned out, depleted, abandoned, adrift, and (possibly) deeply in debt. Your adrenals are tapped, your autoimmunity is activated, you’re pushing through generalized anxiety, protracted grief, and a daily rollercoaster of unpredictable emotions. Every hiccup feels like a crisis.
In other words, you and your business are stuck in survival-mode.
Maybe you’ve begun fantasizing about creating a new business to replace the one you have that no longer works. But then you remember all that you’ve poured into your company. You can’t just walk away! The bricks of your business are stained with the blood, sweat, and tears of your personal losses, challenges overcome, fears met, and strengths forged by tests of character.
You’ve met your limits and moved beyond them even when you felt unsupported, under-resourced, exhausted, humiliated, abandoned or sick.
You did this over and over because you believed in the power of what you were creating in as much as you believed in yourself. You poured so much of your life-force into making your business work. And it did work! For a long time, it worked. You’ve had peak years and wild successes. Visions manifest and dreams come true. At times, it seemed that supernatural forces were propelling you forward into a glorious future.
But then, something shifted. The winds were no longer at your back but whipping you in the face. You doubled down, took on debt or outside work, and reassured yourself, “If I can just get back to that place where I was a few years ago, then this will all be worth it.”
I was there for 4 years myself, trying to survival-mode my way out of survival-mode in my business, attempting to breathe new life into old ways of doing business—working harder, sacrificing more, trading my creativity and optimism for grit and determination with the mistaken belief that meritocracy, martyrdom, and a lot of hyper-functioning would provide me a pathway out of entrepreneurial stagnation.
It didn’t work.
My business remained firmly lodged in freeze mode while I flooded my system with adrenaline in a desperate attempt to recover my long-lost entrepreneurial momentum, magic, and flow.
It’s Not You, It’s Just Capitalism Collapsing
Why is this happening??? Why are we all failing in business? Is feminist failure trending? Is this karmic #girlboss backlash? Has feminism gone too far? Is it the autocracy? The patriarchy? The macro economy? Is it your nervous system?
I’ve been thinking about this for a while now and I’ve concluded: