Stepping into a Season of Change.
Today, we are officially stepping into a season of change, of growth, & of rebirth. For years, I’ve felt nudged toward slowness & have increasingly found my soul aching for calm & simplicity. Ignoring this ache has manifested itself in my life through health issues, anxiety, depression, & ultimately a “successful” business that often leaves me feeling exhausted & highly stressed consistently, leaving little room for life in between it all.
This has plagued me for a really long time because ultimately, I deeply love to create —& this business has connected me with so many of the most incredible small business owners that I could ever hope to know. I wholeheartedly love & believe in the work that we do & in its ability to transform the businesses we work with. It’s helped me to find myself & to narrow in on my strengths & talents & to feel pride in what I’m creating. Financially, this work has provided real, tangible income for my family & has, at some level, allowed us an element of freedom in order to travel + work from anywhere or have a flexible schedule in order to be at my kids’ soccer games & events.
Except… What people often skip over are the dark parts. The parts where yes, you might be able to go on a trip – but you might also be sleep-deprived & working from a dark hotel room while everyone else is sleeping off the day’s activities; or you may be at the soccer games but you know that in order to be there it’s going to mean you’re up until 3am catching up on what you didn’t have time to wrap up before it began.
We fail to talk about the times when you’re working 16 hours a day & those emails go unanswered for the third day in a row because there is simply too much to fit into a reasonable day & you feel the need to be everything for everyone, all the time (even though you try to say no + set boundaries!). Then, when you DON’T meet those unrealistic, robot-like expectations for yourself & check off everything from your list, your self worth starts to take a hit because you know you’ve let others down in the process.
The parts that we glaze over in the small business world are that you can build a “successful” business on paper & not really feel successful in life. Because ultimately what I’m internalizing more & more is that success isn’t really anything at all if it doesn’t come with joy & space & LIFE, too. And if your business is set up in a way that requires you to give everything you have just to run it, it’s probably not really working for your life — & at that point, why be running your own business at all?
It’s easy to get caught in the minutia of it all — To stay in the weeds and plug along with your work and pay your bills and take on the extra client and to get by on “good enough.” It’s hard to slow or stop the pace long enough to find clarity to rethink & reset — & it’s a trap I’ve been caught in for too long.
The last few months have been some of the most challenging I’ve ever experienced & I’ve found myself feeling overwhelming anxiety in knowing that change has needed to happen (without truly knowing what that change looked like or where to go next).
On a particularly low day, after working a disgusting amount of hours that week & feeling completely depleted, I knew I was done with how it’s been & with how my life has been looking. I knew it had to stop.
I started exploring my options. I thought through what it would be like to explore a new career path or to find a job designing for someone else or looking at what else I could do to fix this problem that was being presented to me.
Except, I started realizing that maybe it wasn’t a problem at all — but maybe it was an opportunity. That maybe the universe was clearing space for this new chapter for my life. And maybe the ache I was feeling wasn’t encouraging me to quit, but instead to shift. To reset. To change.
I realized that the idea of stepping away from MARA was absolutely heart wrenching & that it wasn’t the answer – but that I needed to craft a new MARA altogether.
It became clear to me that I needed a full stop to catch my breath; and with that, to stop taking clients for even a short time in order to restructure our services and our processes and the way my life looks in relation to the business. So while we’ll still be working to wrap up active existing projects, we will no longer be accepting new ones until we come back in June with fresh processes, renewed boundaries, realigned values, & simplified offerings that create space for a calmer, more intentional life, for elevated creativity, & for increased connection.
This is a coming back to center. ✨