It doesn’t have to be perfect to make a start
My first attempt at writing a ‘blog’ and I'm sure 10 years too late! Do people even read blogs anymore? If you are reading this then thank you for joining me. I do love to write, although English at school was never my strength. My old English teacher would always scrawl across my essays ‘too colloquial’ which only when writing this have I looked it up to discover it means ‘ordinary or familiar conversation rather than formal speech or writing’. I’m actually pleasantly surprised, writing colloquially is much more my style. No formalities or pretence here. I hope my blog is friendly and inspiring. It may not be gramatically correct and will have a distinctive lack of ‘big words’ but I hope you find it interesting and through it will help re-connect myself and others. My first post was always going to be a bit long-winded - more of a self coaching session for me to get me started. Then food, lifestyle, travel, interiors, gardening, thrifting & DIY to follow!
About me
I’m 43 and mother to my daughter Eva, my old Labrador Lilly dog, Hammie the rodent, Star the rabbit and other endless wildlife we look after in the garden. I love food and very partial to bread & cheese and any thing French. I love adventures and travelling, discovering new places and uncovering old and worn treasures along the way. My garden & flowers fills me with a lot of joy although I have no idea what I’m doing and learning all the time.
I love to create, to be inspired and to inspire others. I hope to be the owner of my own business built through doing the things I love which I’ve worked so hard on over the years to set up. I’ve created a holiday let which is all ready to go and a lovely little space at home for workshops, gatherings and a little shop too. I just need a push to get it off the ground and to knock down a few barriers I’ve put up which I’m hoping through this blog and with your help I can do.
finding my brave
I’ve been stuck stationary in a funny place for a while now whilst trying to navigate and understand the rollercoaster of life. Not being confident with who I am and this ridiculous drive for a ‘perceived perfection’ that isn’t even who I am has prevented me from trying to achieve the best person of myself. As a woman I feel we put far too much pressure on ourselves to be perfect, on convincing others that we and our lives are perfect because if we don’t we fear we are so easily criticised, which quite often we are. Recently I’ve become more aware that unknowingly I've been passing the same socialisation onto my daughter, encouraging her to dress perfectly and to behave perfectly whilst battling my own fears of failing as a mother. Often I’ve had quite high and unfair expectations of her. I would get frustrated with her when she gets cross and instantly refuses to even ‘try’ and do her homework. When she thinks she can’t do something or hasn’t done it before she doesn’t want to be seen to get it wrong. So rather than peservering to get it right she refuses to even make a start. She’s scared of being ‘imperfect’ and I am aware I have played a fundamental role in making her feel like that. Eva has her own quirks and her processing of the world works a little differently to mine and that’s OK. I need to be more accepting of that and allow her to be who she is. If the world adopted more of this approach, and we all became more accepting of each other and our differences, then what a kinder world we’d live in and how much braver and supported we would feel in trying to reach for our true potential. I truly believe so much potential, especially in women is never reached because they are too scared to try, and I have and still currently am an exact example of that.
I’ve been working on business ideas for the vast majority of my life but the one I’m sat on right now has by far had the biggest investment of money. There’s always an excuse that it’s not quite ready and there’s always more still to do. By delaying action, I’m keeping myself safe. Dreams get to stay clean and protected but the problem is that clean and protected dreams only ever stay as that. I’ve accepted that there will never be a day where I go ‘yes, everything is done, it’s finally ready’ because perfection is like a unicorn - it doesn’t exist and the more you chase it the further away it feels.
I need to stop and as Reeshma Saujani inspired me to do, is to raise myself and my daughter to be brave….not perfect. For women and mothers raising daughters out there here is the link to her Ted Talk which I found truly inspiring and well worth a listen.
Growing up I was always the child that felt she didn’t quite fit in. I would never take my school jumper off and I wore my hair the same way with the same orange hair bobble for 6 years. I used lashings of Silvkrin hair spray to remove any sign of life out of my fringe and every morning it was the same for fear if I did something slightly differently then other children would look twice at me and all I wanted to do was to blend into the background. I grew up with my head in turmoil. I never wanted attention because I feared that created criticism but I also never wanted to look the same, I wanted to be me. Outside of school, at the age of 15, I’d travel on the train down from York to Covent Gardens in London and the markets to buy the clothes that I knew no one else would have. The clothes rarely ever left the house but wearing them in my bedroom made me feel so good about myself. As I got braver travelling, my quest to find unique clothes and homewares took me all over the world to the likes of places such as Haight Street in San Fransisco in search of the promise of ‘boho’ clothes, the Souks of Marrakech and the Chatachuk market in Bangkok for the biggest flea market in the world.
Finding my thing
I went to university, discovered jagerbombs and aftershock and I started to come more out of my shell. I literally let my hair down! After university I went travelling to America and had the best time of my life. I love travelling, to see our beautiful world and to meet and interact quietly and unobtrusively with different nations. Where no one knows you, there are no expectations of you, no pre-defined opinions and I can relax enough to feel great joy at exploring the world as myself.
I’ve had quite a few entrepreneurial ideas over the years. In my younger years I’d make things to sell on a market stall in York. There was a huge 2nd hand furniture shop in York called the Banana Warehouse, where the owner allowed me to take pieces home to paint then bring them back to the shop for him to sell which for some reason I did for free! I was just elated they thought they were good enough to sell! I’ve always had ambition but I never seem to quite succeed nor make any money from my ventures. Something always and still keeps holding me back.
After travelling to Morocco, Nepal and India, I embarked on setting up my own little import business. To bring unique, uncannily the ‘imperfect’ handcrafted artisan items into our homes was my mission. After a short holiday to Morocco and several arguments with Ryan Air over my ‘excess baggage’ where I ended up having to wear the contents of my suitcase just so I could bring back some encaustic Moroccan tiles, I decided to learn how to ship a container over. Fortunately for me my partner at the time worked in sales, for it probably doesn’t surprise you that I’m terrible at negotiating; way too emotional! I have zilch poker face and always fill an awkward silence. As most of our holidays had revolved around the markets of the world, I’d had many opportunities to see him at work. After years of only being able to watch the negotiation under strict instructions not to speak, nor give away any body language to suggest just how much I love something, I was finally let loose to go out alone and secure my first deal in the Souks of Marrakech. I was given 20 dirhams to go away and purchase 3 camels (not real ones) that were on average being sold to the tourists for 10 dirhams each. I returned with 1 camel that cost me 30 dirhams and a big fat fail but I didn’t care.
This camel was special, he was the one that spoke to me, the scruffy one, the one with the wobbly leg and had been bashed around. This was the camel for me, and I would never have traded him in for 3 perfect new ones despite being the better deal! My partner named him ‘Tat’ to add to my collection back home and much doubt hung over my ability to ever make money!
How to fail in business
So with my container full of Moroccan treasures en-route to Felixstowe my first little business was born, albeit it was never to succeed. I struggled to feel comfortable selling my unique, handcrafted, imperfect but beautiful things in a world that craved so much perfection. I became obsessed with customer satisfaction, meeting the customers satisfaction beyond their expectations, to such a degree whereby I’d send out ‘free gifts’ to help mitigate any dissapointment that I disproportionately feared I would get. Yup, my business was never going to work and it certainly wasn’t going to land me an appearance on ‘The Apprentice’!
Anyones who’s ever bought anything from Morocco will know that it comes with a distinct smell. A smell that is not always desirable. It only took one customer complaint on that ‘smell’ that led to the downfall of my business. I became obsessed with imperfections and the need to point out every single imperfection on everything I was selling. At one point I imported 22,000 knobs from India and I kid you not, I sold each one by taking photos of every single knob, and highlighting any imperfection so the customer always knew exactly what they were getting. Crazy! Am I sharing too much? You’re going to think I’m bonkers. The time I spent doing this was certainly not reflected in the money that I made. In my product descriptions I undersold everything and sold everything as cheap as I could to help receive maximum customer satisfaction. I eventually sold all my knobs and I moved onto my next search for imperfect beautiful things. Trips to France in my van buying from brocantes and depot ventes was my next thing and the thing where I still know my heart lies. The problem was and still is, that I have a problem selling imperfect things to a world where I’m scared to be imperfect in.
How do I let go of perfection?
I need to find peace with my imperfections and learn to embrace them. I have a big nose but it’s covered in freckles and I love freckles and my wonderful dad wouldn’t be my dad if I hadn’t inherited his nose! I’ve also struggled for years with infertility that has had a huge impact with my struggles of feeling imperfect. I am utterly blessed to have been able to become a mother to my daughter on this journey but I’ve been unable to give her a sibling. I am slowly starting to accept and heal from this but it’s something I know I’ll always feel I couldn’t accomplish, despite the immense physical and emotional effort I put in. Throughout my journey, I experienced heart breaking knock backs and losses yet I’d continue to pick myself up and put myself through it again, despite the percentage of it actually working for me being around 5%. My body not being able to do something I felt is often regarded as ‘given’ being a woman, I have struggled with. It’s had a huge detrimental effect on my confidence and my belief in myself that I could achieve and accomplish my goals. Now I have to be brave enough to let go. I did my absolute best and it just wasn’t meant to be and that doesn’t mean to say I have to stop trying to achieve in other areas of my life. My story just isn’t going to look quite like the perceived perfect world I thought, that society helped me to believe, should look like.
A family is defined in so many ways and I have so much love, so much adventure, so much ambition and my daughter will hopefully learn so much from this. I just need to start putting me into action. I need to find my brave. My infertility journey has always felt too great to let go, that I’d invested too much to quit, but sometimes greater things can only happen after you let go.
I’m still on my journey to letting go, writing this is part of my journey to trying to do just that and as I let go of ‘perfection’ and what society has led me to perceive how my life and family should look, hopefully my business will have the space to grow and who knows one day I might finally start making some money!
“The Way to get started is to quit talking and begin doing”
- Walt Disney
And now I intend to do just that!