BLED DRY
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BLED DRY

The thing which has most fucked me up on my journey of business badassery, the thing I’ve somehow got myself all a-tangled up in too many times to remember,

(and definitely so many it’d be embarrassing to share anyhow!)

is that I every so often forget who TF I am and start thinking I need to adjust course from a perspective of ‘the way it came out of me isn’t right’.

Typically when I do this, just to make sure I’m really gettin’ the whole ‘don’t be me!’ approach right, I find or call in a person or group of persons who we shall refer to as ‘The Proper Adults’.

The proper adults … you know. The ones who I admire. Am impressed by. Consider to have an upright and orderly manner about them. Designate ‘success powers’ to largely based on the fact that they do it so differently to me and therefore it must be better! Often times these people definitely adhere to the more … TRADITIONAL, shall we say, approach to marketing. They be in the RELIGION. And happy about it! (I think).

Yes yes, it’s true … even after 15 years in the online space … 20 in business … 39 ‘entrepreneuring’, if you count my sales endeavours which began at 3 years old, AND I DO … I still deviate at times to that old hairy chestnut about ME not being good enough, ME being the one who does it wrong.

Does it wrong?

Life, obviously, duh. And every bit of it. To be clear, I absolutely do NOT think or believe this about myself! But there is a THING … an ENTITY … an old piece of fear and no longer needed identity … which still tries to attach itself back onto me now and again. Think of it like when you unsubscribe from an email list … opt out altogether … and then 6 months later the fucker pops back up in your inbox, just breaking compliance all over the place! Or, maybe you didn’t actually fully opt-out. Either way, no need to take it personally. Opt out again! Unsubscribe, motherfucker, NO thanks for coming!

Same sort of thing.

And when that ‘thing’, whatever it is circles on back to me, the long and the short of what it says is –

“You don’t do life right Kat, you get it ALL kinds of wrong, and besides which you look SILLY. You don’t dress right, walk right, do your hair right, think right, you’re not like the other girls and it’s possible you DON’T EVEN DESERVE TO EXIST”.

Look, it’s pretty common stuff. I’m guessing you’d have your own version somewhere in there that pops up now and again. And that you do the work around it when it does! Maybe a lot of work. Either way –

it’s about realising that we get to see these thought patterns for what they are. Not part of us. Separate to us. NOT our beingness.

Your beingness knows you get to be fully you, God sees that it is good, and the world does too!

Amen.

But awareness is a funny thing, isn’t it. We don’t always get it unless in retrospect. Discernment, ‘knowing’, seeing right away … it’s a practice. One I will continue to practice for the rest of my life!

And when I fall off path, as I invariably do, and then wake up a day or a week or a few months later and realise WHOOPS –

I did it again!

I choose to be kind to myself about it. Shrug. See it for what it is. And set the intention that next time I will notice faster, perhaps even right away!

I hope you are kind to yourself too, when you float off path from you.

I pray you know that your fears and doubts and ‘not enoughs’ are not of God and not of you.

Because in business, here’s the thing.

And I believe this so very deeply, down to the core of me. With every cell in my body I know this to be true in fact! And I say this knowing full well it goes against the rules of effective marketing! The RELIGION rules.

But,

whose rules are they?

Not mine! And I don’t believe yours either.

The thing:

The way it came out of you was right.

Take a moment with me here, now. And breathe this in. Do you feel it? Inhale with me, deeply. And then exhale in a whoosh. Yes, that’s right. Let go of all that tension you’ve been carrying, telling yourself to do it a different way. That YOU have to adjust, for it to be right. And work. That you should be you! Just – not too much. And not like that. No, not that bit either.

NO.

The way it came out of you was right.

Whisper it with me –

The way it came out of me was right.

And now a shout – !

THE WAY IT CAME OUT OF ME WAS RIGHT.

I can’t tell you how many times I have sat in meetings,

conversations,

etc,

and gone through everything or some of what I’ve created with a fine-tooth comb, planning a way to put it all into some kind of proper structure, order, sequence, so it ‘makes more sense for people’.

WHICH PEOPLE?!

And what a horrible devastating blow to the soul –

when it lets out what’s in it,

the bloody raw pulsing heart of YOU,

exposes it to the world!

art and mess and madness everywhere!

And then you turn around a minute or a year later and say,

let me just chop you up a little, clean you up, box you up, and send you off to the world all wrapped in an orderly bow.

100 neat little boxes, all the same, lined up one after the other. And perhaps a pretty polished shiny machine, to process and print and send it all out, just so!

I used to work on a procession line. A summer spent in a factory earning sweet sweet cash. Place component, send circuit board off to the right, turn head just so to the left, repeat. Don’t miss a beat! Or you’ll throw off the whole line.

It’s not that sweet anymore when you’re doing it with your own life.

Tick-tack, tick-tack, tick-tack, goes the noise of the factory,

as it spits out little pieces of what your soul unleashed,

all perfectly matching,

mess and gore cleaned up,

rolled up in a nice pretty ball,

and coated in chocolate.

So the world can gulp it down,

acceptably,

because it looks like something they know.

Nobody ever needs to know there was a piece of you in there,

drowned

chopped

destroyed

and bled dry

before being made into a candy and put in its box.

And why would they?

There’s nothing to recognise at all.

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