Giving Up On the Dream

Mr. Vinny and his sister Evie

Hi Friend,

I almost gave up on my dream! My heart was hurting, and I was making the big move from an apartment into a house of my own with Nic (my husband) at long last. I started Candid and Classy or C&C back in 2014 when I still lived in Texas. It was my dream to run a small-scale fashion line for the plus-size body and provide personal styling for women in a way that helped them have a better relationship with the person they wanted to be.

I spent so much time learning and trying to do it all that I was sure that I would be able to impact the lives of the women I so desperately wanted to help. This year however I set C&C aside and threw my arms up. As you can likely imagine this was one of the hardest things I have ever done.

Setting aside C&C was so hard it played straight to my fear of failure. I will get into why this happened in a future blog. But now I was asking myself, how can I bring the inspiration of change to others' lives if I can’t even get my own in order?

What I have learned in the quiet space away from “having to perform and push the growth of my brand” is hard to put into words, but it starts with getting quiet.  I have learned to actively watch how I feel about a task, activity, or circumstance and give myself space around what I feel a reaction to.  In my effort to succeed I would push myself to the point of overwhelm, numbing all the uncomfortable feelings that may tell someone to step back, without being aware of this.

Which meant I failed time and time again and only recently have begun to understand why.  What I have learned is to watch how I feel in my body when I interact with tasks, activities, or circumstances that could bring stress. If the feeling of overwhelm comes up I need to break the task, activity, or circumstance down into sub-component parts. (More about how to accomplish this breakdown in a later blog. Hopefully, I will remember to share a link here.)

I would fail because in the process of shutting down the overwhelm I would also shut down my normal emotions and come across as dead inside to people. If you can picture this.  You are nervous beyond all get out; however, you show up to the event and you push yourself to talk to people. You feel strongly that your cause is worth showing up for, giving your 110% as they say. However, the fear trips a survival switch, and you start to close yourself off from the people around you, becoming unrelatable or unapproachable.  Yup, this was me for years without understanding what I was doing.

I did not understand I was the cause of my failure without recognizing why, harsh to say but it is true. The harder I tried the worse it got.  

When we moved to our house, I got sick, and it took me almost a year to feel like myself again. Now I feel like this was a blessing in disguise because it helped me achieve a perspective shift that allowed me to connect to myself in a new way. My new perspective paired with my growing awareness of my physical body helped me to understand how for so long I had been getting in my own way.  

So, for now, I am becoming self-aware and growing my understanding of who I want to become. I know I am not done with vlogging and blogging, but beyond that, I am not certain.

As for my dream, I have not given up on it, but it is changing to fit the person I am becoming. I know that I want to have children soon, God willing! I find myself drawn to a simpler kind of living such as growing a garden, canning, raising rabbits, and playing with my dogs. I am blessed to be in a place where I can take the time, I need to understand myself. So, my dream is different but not given up on, and it is still changing.

Talk to you soon,

Marie