A Year of Showing Up

This week marks one year. One year of writing something almost every week, sometimes multiple things for the following weeks. One year of my sisters and I getting on Facebook Live, talking too much, getting passionate, being vulnerable, occasionally getting emotional, disagreeing, laughing, oversharing, and somehow finding another thing to talk about the following Monday.

In thinking about this moment, I realized something while thinking about this anniversary. I'm proud of us, but I'm also a little uncomfortable with what this year has proven about me. 

For years, I have told myself a particular story. I have ideas. I have ideas, lots of them. I want to write things, build things, start businesses, create things, change things. My problem: I am exceptionally talented at identifying everything that needs to happen before I can begin. I need a plan. I need to understand the business model. I need better equipment. I need to research it. I need to know how I'm going to monetize it and whether people will actually care. I need to figure out what happens if it works, and what happens if it doesn't. Sometimes, after I've figured out everything I supposedly needed to know before I started, I never actually started.

A year ago, we did something completely different. We got on Facebook Live. That was pretty much it. We didn't have a sophisticated strategy or six months of planning behind us. We started, and then we improved it while we were doing it. We changed things, figured out what worked and what didn't, and found our rhythm. Monday after Monday, we kept showing up.

This Live isn't sponsored. Thousands of people aren't waiting on us every Monday night. It hasn't made us famous, and there hasn't been some enormous external reward constantly reassuring us it's worth doing. Maybe that's exactly why I'm so proud of it. Apparently I can keep a promise to myself even when nobody is paying me to keep it.

A Lot Can Happen in 52 Weeks

This little Monday night Live has survived a lot. Job loss. People loss. Plans that didn't work and new ideas that replaced them, along with the endings of some of those new beginnings. Tears, therapy, and occasionally the Live becoming its own strange version of therapy. There have been weeks when life was good and weeks when it absolutely was not. There was even a week when I was in Spain, and it was around two in the morning for me when it was time to go Live. I showed up anyway. That one sticks with me.

 I have gotten up early, stayed late, rearranged childcare, changed vacations, answered emails at ridiculous hours, and sacrificed sleep because something mattered to an employer. I know how to make someone else's priorities non-negotiable. A year ago, apparently, I started learning how to do that for something that belonged to me. I don't think I appreciated that until now.

Maybe It’s a Discipline Problem

That's the uncomfortable part. There are things I've wanted to do for years that I haven't started, things I've started and abandoned, notebooks full of ideas, plans sitting in folders, business concepts I've researched to death. Things I have convinced myself I will begin as soon as I have enough time, enough money, enough information, or enough certainty.

But now, now I have evidence. For 52 weeks I have shown myself that I can be consistent. So maybe the question isn't why can't I stick with anything, but rather, what made me willing to keep showing up for this. That's a much more useful question, because if I can figure that out, maybe I can reproduce it.

We didn't wait until we knew where it was going. We let doing it teach us where it could go. Maybe some things can't be completely planned from the sidelines. Maybe clarity sometimes comes from movement.

Taking Inventory

I’m now put on notice to take inventory, not of everything, but everything that I keep saying I want or want to start including the business, the book, the healthier body, idea, trip, etc.  Whatever it is, I will ask myself, “What am I still preparing to do that I could actually being? Not plan. Not Finish. Not perfect. Just begin.”

What have I made unnecessarily complicated because planning feels safer than trying? What am I waiting to understand before experience could teach me? What would this look like if I gave myself permission to be bad at it for six months? What could I commit to doing once a week for the next year? And maybe the hardest one: if I am capable of showing up this consistently for somebody else's dream, what would happen if I gave one of my own dreams that same level of respect?

That last one is the most important for me.

I don't know where these Lives are going. Maybe somewhere enormous, maybe nowhere. But for once, I don't think that's the most important question. I started. I stayed. I learned. I changed. I kept showing up. One year later, something exists that didn't exist before, because my sisters and I decided to keep coming back to it. That's enough for me to be proud of. Actually, it's more than enough.

I wish I had written a letter to myself before that first Live. I would love to know what she was worried about, what she thought needed to happen, what she hoped this might become, what she thought her life would look like a year later. I can't go back and ask her. But I can do something for the woman who will be sitting here on our second anniversary. So this year, I'm writing the letter, and next year, I'm going to open it. Maybe that's what anniversaries are really good for. Not just celebrating how far we've come, but leaving a little evidence for the person we're still becoming.

As you read about my journey, I now turn the question to you:  What would you start differently if you stopped believing you needed to know how it would end before you were allowed to begin?