“I’m going to re-write the blog…. I think I need to make the content more evergreen. Consumable to the masses…” I spewed while going on my 30 minutes of movement - a neighborhood walk which is all I have in me these days during covid. 10 lb heavier and 30 minute walks; that’s how we’re (me, my ego and my wild mind) are surviving.
“You better not!” Sarah said passionately as she usually does. “It will lose its soul.” “You wrote those while you were raising, Dom…. it’s real; you can’t take it away.”
The artist’s conundrum. I guess my internalized commercialism is popping-up. This is what I do for a living- marketing, making things bite-size so people will listen to my ideas. The problem is that we, humans, are only able to hear what we are ready to hear, when we are ready to hear it.
Sarah met me when I was 28 years old. The blog had been around for almost a year before that. I picked up a restaurant job that told me I had to have bangs or clip my hair back in order to work there. The side flip bang wasn’t appropriate for food service apparently.
And I wasn’t about to clip my side bang back. I get what I call “Damon face”. He’s my younger brother, two years my jr. with a huge forehead (sorry bro….he balded in his 20s; he’s used it, and to be fair- I too have a big forehead that I hide with side flip bangs.)
I did what any reasonable person would do, went on the search for full bangs! I lived in this walk-up in Grass Valley California on the corner of Mill and Main. It was an old office building (the legality of them being able to rent it to me is still questionable). Sarah’s salon was right next door. I walked-in and asked for a bang trim.
You see this is the same Sarah that I took out of the country for the first time to Morocco. She’s an artist, a purest...sometimes. And she was on the other line of the phone telling me everything I DIDN'T WANT to hear.
“The people don’t care if it isn’t your voice.” she spouted. “I don’t want to go there.” I huffed on my 30 minute walk with my anything but supportive converse footwear. “You gotta go there; it's what all great artists do.”
“They won’t be happy until my heart is lying raw on the table cubed.” I snarked. “There’s a reason you don’t want to write it.”
Sometimes the people closest to you can see things far beyond when you can. They know you better than anyone, and they love you for it. Year after year, they show up. They’re loyal. Maybe not always right but they are still fucking loyal.
So here it is, my first Lu Curates blog. July 2nd 2014
For starters, everyone should take a shot every time I apologize for not keeping up-to-date on a blog for a nonexistent audience. But this is what we do as humans or at least some of us. We put unrealistic expectations on ourselves, and then shame ourselves for not achieving them. Achievement was how I received love as a child. I’m sure this contributes to my workaholism now.
I’m not deleting them… I’m revisiting. I’m also in the middle of writing a memoir and what better way to re-vist the words I’ve previously written. Blogging was still fairly new in 2014. Instagram was just starting, and the idea of writing publicly was still quite foreign. I would even argue it’s still pretty foreign.
I wouldn’t foster Dominic until the next year or so. Sometimes when we have to make big life-changing decisions, they sit in the back of our minds while we build the courage to execute them. Courage is a muscle; it doesn’t happen overnight. It’s painful. It’s brave. Joyous. It cuts you to the bone until you are ready to move forward and when you do… it becomes self-defining.
So much has changed since that camping trip I wrote about in my first blog. And as we all sit here; in the middle of this pandemic I know I’m not the only one asking myself the big questions of why. What is my purpose in this world? And how can I contribute? How do we grow from such an unprecedented occurrence?
Change happens through consistent daily growth. I’m a stronger writer since that first blog. My ideas around relationships have shifted and my “hearing” privilege is dripping from the sentences of that post. Outside of being critical, I read an account of love. Not many people have to go two years without seeing a sibling. Yet many are right now, at this moment separated from the ones they love most. It's a statement of my own personal strength and the value of family.
The girl who wrote that post six years ago didn’t yet know how to identify her values and in turn create boundaries around them. I am learning that now. One of the hardest things I learned this year was to identify what my 100% is and then settle for nothing less. I’m always telling my clients, “ If you don’t know what your vision is how can you advocate for yourself?” This is true in business, relationship, time management, and consciousness.
Over time, I learned to pursue the impossible because I believe in the power of human potential. Humans have the power to grow exponentially if given the right tools, leaders, and empathy. My question for you is, what does human potential mean to you? How have your values helped you survive the pandemic? And what does 100% look like?