Re-emerging

Becoming visible again.

Everywhere is starting to reopen. After months of isolation, we are re-emerging. Businesses are opening, gatherings are expanding and life is slowing returning to a new normal. I’m having trouble. I have an old MO. A modus operandi. A habit in the way I do things. I like to be invisible. I’ve done a lot of work to break this MO. But with COVID, I allowed it to take hold again.

I’m an introvert. I like being alone. I like the quiet. I recharge alone, I create alone, I am most productive alone. None of this means I prefer to be invisible. It just means that I need and like alone time. Being invisible was something I learned as a child. It was a survival technique. It was effective. The keyword is WAS.

A number of years ago, I realized I didn’t want to be invisible anymore and have done a lot to become visible. It hasn’t been easy or comfortable.

Starting a business really requires me to be visible. Seriously, have you ever seen a successful entrepreneur who was invisible?

Then COVID happened. We hunkered down … we isolated. I got invisible again. Sure, I still wrote blogs, I still posted on Facebook, Instagram and some Linked in. I still continued to move forward. But I also started to fade to grey. I started out strong. I started out with a strong voice. A voice of an entrepreneur. I was being honest about the struggles of an entrepreneur in the mists of COVID. And then I stopped. It was all so hard. Everyday tasks became hard. They took longer. Just going to a grocery store was exhausting. Issuing an ROE was more difficult than before COVID. Wait times on the phone were just awful. I was getting sick of seeing myself all day on zoom. I didn’t want to keep talking about it. I withdrew. I let my old MO become my method.

I’ve been called out.

You see while trying to become the best I can be, I surrounded myself with amazing people. They let me hide … for a bit. Now I’ve been called out.

I tried to stay hiding. I tried to hold them off. I tried to stay in the safety of my world.

But I’ve been called out.

I’ve tried to figure out how to avoid this call out. Then I realize… I asked for this. One day not that long to I declared: “I am visible”. (That day is a whole other blog post… maybe.) On that day I decided that I had something to do on this planet, in this life. I had a role. I may not have known exactly what it was at the time, but I knew I had something to do. I also knew that to do it, I couldn’t be invisible. To do what I was meant to do, I had to stand up, I had to be seen. I had to do what I do best and lead by example.

I guess, as the rest of the country starts to re-emerge, it’s time for me to do so too. It’s time… it’s time to play bigger, play louder. It’s time to let all that is me shine!

… maybe I’ll start tomorrow!

“If you are scared, but you have something inside you that still wants to do it, or that wants to talk about something buy you’re scared of the reaction, then maybe that’s something to be explored.”

On being visible, honest and always scared, creatively human episode #6