I'm In The Messy Middle Again
It was the middle of the night. I had been tossing and turning for hours, my mind in a loop of anxiety mingled with inspiration. There in bed, suddenly a thought hit me. Was I back? Was I there again? Was this my messy middle of building a sustainable, joyful creative business?
I turned over on the other side and gazed at the grey morning light playing behind the curtains. My mind was a tangle of thoughts, ideas, worries and fears. Yes, I thought. That’s it. I’ve hit the messy middle. Shit.
I’ve been here before
The last time I hit the messy middle was about a year earlier, in the middle of my six month leap to take my business full-time. Maybe you remember the blog post I wrote then. During that messy period, I worked through my scarcity mindset, reimagined my habits and rebranded my website. It was a period of anxiety, but also of self-discovery and growth.
That was the messy middle of a 6 month long project. What I’m experiencing now is different. This is the messy middle of my journey from having a tiny side business, to growing it to a stable, sustainable and joyful full-time business. The scope of this creative process is much bigger, the time frame longer, and the mess is… messier. And oh have I wished myself away from this phase.
Looking back, I can see the signs of the messy middle littered throughout the last months. When I hit the milestone of one year as a full-time business owner, but didn’t want to celebrate it because I wasn’t happy about where I was. In my content rut, and trying to figure out why I’ve been in that rut, and what content I want to create going forward.
I didn’t expect a messy middle. I didn’t want a messy middle. The word I chose for this year was Nurture - and that’s the energy I craved. I just wanted things to plod along nicely, for my business to grow steadily and me to be patient and persistent. But that’s not what is happening. It’s up and down and back and forth. Messy.
So what are they, the tangled threads that make up my messy middle? I grapple with that question, because there are many parts to it. But I think, distilled down, it’s about this.
Partly, it’s a natural evolution in my creative work as I’m building a business. And partly, it’s me dealing with the challenges that comes with building a creative business.
My messy challenges of building a business
Let’s start this story with one big decision I made at the end of last year: the start of my membership community. Until then, I had focused on 1-1 creative coaching and people were booking with me, if not consistently then at least with some regularity. I knew already then that starting a membership was a questionable choice from a strictly strategic standpoint. With a small audience at the beginning of my journey, it would have been better to focus on just coaching for a while longer. But after the idea for Companions In Creativity took shape in me, I just couldn’t let it go.
As my focus shifted to the community, the inflow of 1-1 clients dried up. First I thought it was just the effect of winter, but the trend persisted during spring. If my coaching had been more established, if I had been doing it for a long time, it would have been easier to keep it going in the background while building up my membership. But as it was now, I was sat with two offerings that both needed quite a lot of love and attention, and I didn’t manage to devote myself enough to either of them. I felt spread thin, pulled back and forth between trying to market them both, and though it on paper shouldn’t be too hard to market two things simultaneously, I struggled. Rather than doing one thing properly, I did both inefficiently, and I felt like I was constantly doing marketing that didn’t quite work.
This meant that while I during 2021 had seen an increase of my income quarter by quarter, it took a dip in the first quarter of 2022. My income became more predictable and steady with the membership subscriptions, which I liked, but let’s just say it’s not so fun to see your income decrease when you’re trying to grow a business. My confidence took a hit, and in the background, I’ve navigated a persistent low level worry about money and the future.
As I tried to deal with the short term challenges of my business, I was at the same time aware that I needed to work on its long term strength. Choosing a membership model in my business means I need to grow my reach, especially that of my email list, to be able to build my membership big enough to be a good income stream alongside coaching. Which itself requires focused, intentional work.
So here’s where I’ve found myself, in the overwhelm between the long term, the short term and the pressures of selling. And meanwhile, I’ve tried to navigate an evolution of my work.
The messy evolution of my work
All of us evolve in our creative work. Sometimes it’s just the fine-tuning of skills and direction, and sometimes we go through periods of more fundamental shifts. My current evolution started with the big shift last year that changed the shape of my life: going full-time with my creative work.
It wasn’t apparent at first, but once I started to settle into this new life, it became clear that things were changing. It’s like having lived in a valley for years, looking up at and dreaming of climbing the mountain throwing its shadow over your home. You can see its shape when you close your eyes, you know all the little paths and crooks beside it. And then you finally do it, you finally climb that mountain, and you look back out over the so familiar landscape and suddenly everything looks different. It’s all the same, yet your viewpoint has changed. You see your valley from above, you see the mountain under your feet, and when you turn around, you see an entirely new world out there.
From inside this new shape of my life, my perspective has shifted in a thousand small ways that together make up one that I just can’t ignore anymore. In trying to make sense of it, I’ve written about parts of this shift. In autumn, I wrote about being drawn to conversations and the messy process, rather than simple answers and step by step solutions. And earlier this year, I wrote about moving away from talking about slow living as a concept. Both of these stem from this shift in my work. It’s a shift I have had difficulty explaining, but one I’ve felt so clearly inside of me.
This evolution has been easiest to spot in the effects it has had on my inspiration. I’ve gotten less and less interested in the outward look on life and creativity. The packaged up lifestyles, the aesthetic and idea of what a slow and creative life is supposed to look like. I’ve grown weary of the aspirational, and trying to be aspirational. I’ve craved another level of depth and nuance in my work. To focus on what I’ve always considered the core of it: understanding the creative process and how we can navigate our way through the inner challenges of creating.
I’ve tried to follow my inspiration and make this shift in my content. But since I’ve not fully grasped the roots and scope of the shift, changes have existed on the surface and wavered back and forth. On Youtube, I tried to shift towards a more conversational style, and then a more nerdy format of going in-depth on one topic, and then to more practical topics. The experiments have felt good in the moment, but they haven’t stuck. They have just scratched at the surface of a deeper change.
Ever since autumn, I’ve been disoriented in my content. I’ve written fewer blog posts, and felt frustrated with my Youtube channel. I’ve been uninspired by Instagram and unsure of my email letters. An evolution in my work has been there, persistent, lingering, yet just outside my grasp.
How I’m navigating the mess of my middle
So here I am, in the messy mess of my messy middle. It has been a very unsettled end to the spring, I’m not going to lie. I’ve wondered if I’m cut out for all of this. But I have to say, since realising that I’m in the messy middle again, it makes more sense. I know this part of the process.
The messy middle is when we have to deal with the things we don’t want to deal with. That’s when we have to figure out the practical challenges we’ve been able to ignore. It’s when we have to work through the mindsets holding us back, that we’ve managed to avoid until now. The messy middle is when you have to show that you’re truly committed to your creative work.
And I am. I am committed to this creative life I’m living, because however hard it has been, it’s also deeply meaningful and filled with joy. I’m committed to my business, because despite the worries and challenges, it’s still the best job I’ve ever had. I’ve focused on the challenges here, but there is so much that I love and enjoy about this journey too.
So I’m starting to work through it all. I’m devoting my summer to big parts of it, and my main focus for the season is to finally make this shift in my work. Understand it, dig into it, spend time with it. I’ve started where it all starts, with the root of it all: my why. I’m building from the inside out, and it feels so good to finally spend time on this.
Alongside this shift in direction, I’m taking a good look at the messy business bits. I’m putting on my big girl business pants and looking at which strategies have worked and which haven’t. I’m making proper plans for autumn, instead of trying to wing it and stress myself out as I have this spring. I’m looking into what it will take to grow a sustainable business for myself, and how I can grow my reach in a way that is both effective and that feels good.
Perhaps most importantly, I’ve started to unpack murky old stories and experiences that have been lurking at the edges of my business, showing up as self-sabotage and a resistance to marketing. This is the stuff that I know needs dealing with, or it will keep showing up again and again, forever stopping me from getting to where I want.
It’s with a deep sigh that I set out on this journey through my messy middle. It’s a sigh because oh wow I wish it would just be easy. But it’s also a sigh of relief. Relief that I’m finally dealing with this. I’m letting the mess come up to the surface, instead of trying to keep paddling and pushing it down frenetically. It’s hard. It’s messy. And I’m here for it.
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