i ran away today

trees

I ran away today.

Just for the morning. And I didn’t go far. But when this kind of persistent gloom refuses to leave me, I always know precisely the medicine I need.

Trees.

Lots and lots of trees.

So when I woke up feeling no better than I had the night before (or the night before, or the night before that…), I took to the trails. All three of my girls joined me, and it immediately gave the whole hike a gloriously Adventure vibe feeling.

Early on, we paused and parked ourselves along the trail, basking in the warm sun while watching the birds. Sitting there, I presented my “board members” with the questions that have been going round and round in my head for too long now. I already knew what Scott's take would be (these things take time, but do whatever makes you happy), so I needed a more objective perspective from someone other than my partner in crime. Because the great thing about my girls and I? We speak the truth to each other—even if it hurts. I knew that if they thought I was severely off-course, they wouldn’t hesitate to tell me so.

Am I swimming upstream?

Am I missing something obvious?

In your opinion, do you think I should I call it quits or keep on keeping on?

Where was I going wrong?

Am I just throwing money down the drain? (Literally. Because we make soap, haha.)

c'mon suds

All of those questions were about me and my situationship with Suds Me Up, Scotty. I mean, are we a couple or not? Because I’m pretty tired of Suds giving me the cold shoulder after all of the love and endless attention I lavish on him.

For over nine months now, I’ve been giving this business everything I’ve got. Just one thing after another, I take each road (or detour) as it presents itself to me. It’s been great in a lot of ways, actually, and I’ve learned so many new things over the past year. Since I’m a problem-solver by nature, I usually enjoy tackling the challenges and even when I hit a roadblock, it doesn’t generally distress me because it’s all part of the process. And sometimes, like now, I understand that that process can be painstakingly sloooooooow.

But the question looms: Am I making any progress within the process? At all? Or am I only spinning in place? Because I feel like I'm spinning. I’ve been proactive, even doing the things that I didn’t at all want to do, but it still hasn’t amounted to much of anything. Except, of course, more soap than I could use in a lifetime.

The local, organic farm that was going to sell our soaps this year at their weekly farmer’s market had to put off our partnership for the time being due to a rather large and unexpected hiccup at the very beginning of their farming season.

After all of my SEO work, apparently Google still hates me.

Only a month into my very reluctant dance with Instagram, and I think my mental health is being comprised (and is, quite likely, contributing to this gloom).

And we’re handing out 90% of our soaps to precisely the wrong people (a.k.a. the ones who don't give a damn).

am i dumb?

I don’t want to give up (most days, anyway), but I've been known to keep on fighting long after I should've called it quits. Sometimes that perseverance ends in triumphant success, but other times it just ends in profound exhaustion. And right now I'm in need of just a wee bit of reassurance that this isn’t one of the dumbest ideas I’ve ever had (because I’ve had a few). And you know what makes a dumb idea even dumber? Pursing it endlessly when everyone but me can see that it has no future.

Most days I know—and can vividly see—exactly what I want Suds Me to be. We're not striving to be millionaires or to build an empire here, but my vision most definitely involves selling soap on a consistent basis. Lately, though, everything feels hazy and confusing, and the endless work for no reward has me feeling a tad discouraged.

So after laying it all out on the table, the collective answer my girls gave me was this: you’ve been trying to sell your soaps when what you need to be selling is YOU. My middle girl was especially emphatic about this, telling me that from the get-go she thought we should be making people fall in love with us—who Scott and I are as a team. We have the funny business name, the quirky soap bar names, and we’re high school sweethearts who—thirty-one years later—still genuinely like each other. That alone makes us unusual and that, she stressed, should be our selling point.

All along, I've been trying to find the people like myself who hunt out the kind of products we make. Clean, vegan, all-natural products with organic ingredients whose names I actually recognize. My girls, however, think I’ve been going about it all wrong. They say that when people like us, they’ll support us, even if they don’t give a shit about a “clean” soap bar. So what we need to focus on? Selling our relationship. Selling our personalities. Selling who we are together. WE are the brand, and we need to use that to start moving our soaps. To strangers.

present nobodies

Not a one of them thinks that Instagram is going to help me, and they all put their money on YouTube. One of the reasons for this is that YouTube thinks ahead. Thinks smart. And who, in the future, will be YouTube's next cash cows? The nobodies of the present.

So they push the small content creators, tossing them into many algorithms and seeing where—or if—they stick. We’ve watched this unfold over the past year with my youngest daughter as she steadily makes upward progress, navigating the waters as a content creator on this two-decade-old platform. The great news is: it’s working. Faster than she’d hoped. But all I see every day on Instagram are the posts with tens of thousands of likes. And if that’s what I’m seeing, then no one—NO ONE—is going to see my posts.

Unless I hustle.

And I despise the Instagram hustle.

So really, I'd love for them to be right about this. Because YouTube, with its largely anonymous subscribers, is a whole different ballgame. A ballgame that causes me far less stress and involves absolutely no hustle. But then there's this confusion that plagues me (thank you, Neptune), and I just keep trying one thing after another, hoping to finally catch a break somewhere. Will it be YouTube? Instagram? Or something I haven't even tried/thought of yet? It's actually a pretty interesting thing for me to contemplate, most of the time. But right now, I'd give anything for a solid inside tip.

the takeaway

So the takeaway from our tree-side chat today was this:

Don’t give up. At least not yet, because none of them think I’ve explored the channel that will actually generate steady flow.

Lean into our brand.

Keep talking to the camera. Which, it turns out, is way easier than I thought it would be. But when you put me and Scott in front of the camera together, all we do is goof around. Which, my girls tell me, is precisely what we need to do. (Thank goodness, because we can't seem to stop laughing.)

hello happiness

Out in the woods today, breathing in the crisp air laden with all of those glorious tree-borne essential oils, I finally felt myself relax for the first time in weeks. Stopping to hug a tree, I relaxed even more. Basking in the soothing silence of the woods, still more. And silently pursuing some Solitary Sandipipers with my birder daughter as she snapped bazillions of photos, I felt happiness break through again (while leaning against a tree).

My mind slowed down and uncluttered itself.

I re-prioritized.

And reminded myself, yet again, that slow and steady wins the race.

I ran away today.

Just for the morning. And I didn’t go far. But when this persistent gloom refuses to leave me, I always know precisely the medicine I need.

Trees.

Lots and lots of trees.

(And maybe a sandpiper or two.)

Trees

I think that I shall never see

A poem lovely as a tree.

A tree whose hungry mouth is prest

Against the earth’s sweet flowing breast;

A tree that looks at God all day,

And lifts her leafy arms to pray;

A tree that may in Summer wear

A nest of robins in her hair;

Upon whose bosom snow has lain;

Who intimately lives with rain.

Poems are made by fools like me,

But only God can make a tree.

~Joyce Kilmer