I Was Going To Quit

The pandemic hit. I was laid out sick with original flavor COVID-19 so shut downs happened at an opportune time. Of course, I didn’t know at the time I had it.

After self-recovery, business was off limits. Pandemic Unemployment Assistance helped financially. Emotionally and psychologically, I was great, actually enjoying the peace and solitude.

Honestly, before lockdowns, things weren’t going great for business. Years of struggling to make ends meet and all these missteps and bleeding money into things that weren’t working sucked. I saw the pandemic as an opportunity to re-invent myself and discover something else I can do to make myself recession proof so that if something like this ever happened again in my lifetime, I wouldn’t have the hardship.

I spent a lot of my time watching and listening to self-improvement videos and podcasts. They brewed with ideas and value that inspired me to play around and revisit my past and remember what I enjoyed doing in previous years that I could do again and possibly make money doing.

In the process, somehow, I decided to re-do my website because something wasn’t working right and someone else built the site for me and I had no friggin’ clue how to use WordPress and that was going to take a long ass time to learn.

Taking into account what I was learning from all these different coaches, creatives, and self-improvement gurus, I built a website that was more personal, conversational, and somewhat brutally honest. After all, it made sense to do this because I am working in an intimate space with people and they want to know who they are potentially working with. I didn’t really care if it didn’t follow the formula of other spa or massage therapy websites. I made what I wanted and if people were on board with what I had to offer, great. If not, so what. I had been doing this for 8 years and haven’t been completely satisfied with where business was so I don’t care, I’ll go do something else.

Still, I had to continue this work as my main hustle because it was the main source of income. I could build up the side hustles and make the transition at some point.

Over a year later, the transition hasn’t happened because something else happened: business became abundant.

I know this is something I’m good at and had it in my head that I’m just going to do what I know I can do and roll with it. I don’t have all the answers and skills and won’t pretend that I do.

With reckless abandonment of the idea that I had to be a certain type of way or person to make it as a successful massage therapist, I gained traction. I thought, “Well, a lot of the spas aren’t open yet, that’s probably why people are finding me.” I might have thought maybe it’s because of my skills and talents but took it as a fluke.

Business continued to grow, almost at an alarming rate. “What is going on?” I wondered. Is this the Universe telling me to stay in this line of work? I was ready to give up on this career…

Now, I am re- committed to doing this work. Any side hustle that I thought about working on isn’t even a blip on the radar. My main hustle takes up a majority of my time and the rest is personal time to chill and recover (and hike).

I really do enjoy doing what I can to help people and this is one way to do that. This is different from before in that I am doing it in a more authentic way. It’s an evolution of self that is exciting!

Do I still have thoughts of quitting? Sometimes. Those are very vague thoughts, though. For whatever reason, I’m more in this than ever before, looking into more trainings and ways to add value to my sessions.

I hope you enjoy going on this journey with me.