My business died because I did

I unexpectedly dove into revising my website yesterday morning. I started somewhere around 9 a.m. and finished around 3 p.m. Six hours deeply immersed in the only place where I feel I can truly be myself.

Creating freely. Speaking freely. Offering what feels true.

Even if not one pair of eyes ever sets sight on it, it’s mine. Not only in its content, but in its structure and ecosystem.

My website is hosted through a North Carolina web development company I found years ago when I launched my photography business. They are one of the few companies that have retained my loyalty for nearly 20 years because their level of care reflects something I value deeply: attention, thoughtfulness, and genuine investment in what they create.

That kind of alignment is rare.

To have a space where the entire ecosystem feels coherent. Where the structure itself reflects the expression.

Where what exists beneath the surface supports what is being shared above it.

That has always mattered to me.

This morning, while browsing my email, I read something from Joe Hudson. I became a fan of his last year after watching a coaching video that I immediately shared with everyone in my circle because, honestly, the ice cream cone analogy around 28:00 made me giggle.

Partly because it reminded me of conversations I’ve had with many of my own clients. I’ve learned that wit is a favorite — and yet, highly underrated — tool.

In his email, he was discussing decision-making and wrote:

"A great decision isn’t one where you get what you want. It’s one where you stay who you want to be, no matter the result."

Reading that, I saw myself.

For much of the past year, I’ve been wrestling with a question:

How do I honor what feels true while also creating something sustainable?

It sounds simple.

It hasn’t been.

Last year, I did try to evolve my work. I listened deeply. I allowed my perspective to expand. I explored how my offerings could reflect the changes I had experienced personally and spiritually.

But there was another truth I had to acknowledge.

The way I understand healing — the way I have come to experience it through my own life, grief, embodiment practices, and years of exploration — is not necessarily the language most people are searching for right now.

And that is difficult to admit.

Because when you feel deeply connected to something, the desire is to share it exactly as it is. To offer it in its purest form.

But businesses exist within ecosystems.

There is timing.

Readiness.

Needs.

A collective reality.

And I found myself faced with another question:

Do I abandon parts of myself in order to create something financially sustainable?

The uncomfortable truth is that some degree of concession exists no matter which path I choose.

The thought of returning to a traditional job after building my own businesses for the past 20 years brought up its own grief. Not because there is anything wrong with that path, but because I knew I would likely be making compromises there too.

So I chose the path that, for right now, gives me the most of what I want.

A place to create.

A place to contribute.

A place where I can still be in relationship with the work I love.

Maybe that changes someday.

Maybe a new dream emerges.

Maybe the path takes another unexpected turn.

I don’t know.

And perhaps that is the part that has been hardest to accept.

The last two years have not simply changed my business.

They changed me.

Daily somatic immersions stripped away so many identities I had consciously and unconsciously adopted that, for a while, I wasn’t sure what would remain.

At the time, it felt less like growth and more like a hell I would never return from.

Some days, it still does.

I now realize my business died because I did.

I just didn’t recognize it while it was happening.

For a while, I blamed and shamed myself — and everything else I could point to.

I needed to.

It was part of the process.

I had to bring those perspectives out of the closets where I had stored them during my “act as if regardless of circumstances” era.

They were valid.

And there is still truth in them.

Throwing those perspectives on the witness stand and interrogating them — with rage and grief in my heart — taught me a great deal about life.

About its impermanence.

Its incompleteness.

And the presence and humility required to live inside both.

Yesterday’s revisions of my website didn’t feel like resurrecting something from the past. Nor did they feel like abandoning what had been revealed to me over the last two years.

They felt like an invitation into something much more uncomfortable...

The willingness to hold multiplicity.

To hold infinite potential alongside limitation.

That the embodied expression can remain alive.

That truth can remain true.

And that the form it takes exists in relationship to reality.

Maybe my work does not need to carry the entire weight of what I see.

Maybe no single offering, business model, or container could.

Perhaps my responsibility is not to collapse the future into the present, but to remain in relationship with what is asking to emerge while honoring the reality of what is here now.

The vision has not disappeared.

It has simply found different doorways.

It lives in my writing.

In my conversations.

In the spaces I create with you.

In the questions I continue to ask.

In the rooms I continue to show up in.

And perhaps my approach hasn’t changed as much as I thought it had.

Maybe I’m simply carrying new data.

Is this another iteration?

Does it matter?

I just know it is different.

And it is the same.

In all the ways that matter.

For now, this is the path I’m choosing.

And we’ll see where it leads.

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My business died because I did

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