Four months ago, I filmed my first official YouTube Video. I published it last week. You’re probably wondering why I let so much time pass between filming and publishing the video.

After posting the video, I felt good. And I rode that wave, allowing the momentum to feed into energy I directed towards my second business venture, The Karate Corner (TKC), since I still felt a little burnt out with anything to do with Unbound Creation (UC).

It felt good, though, as I hadn’t focused on TKC in a long time. I found myself getting up with that same excitement I had felt when creating my website for UC, only this time it was to work on finally opening a shop on Etsy for TKC. Although I had already spent a year creating a website for TKC, making the journals, and gathering and organizing the information that would be included within the inserts available for purchase, I didn’t initially plan to have an Etsy shop because I thought I would be able to talk to Dojo owners directly and in person as I biked across the nation and back on my tour. In my mind, I envisioned sending a few journals to each of the Dojo owners I talked to as a small sampling for them to offer for sale to their students. They would get a cut of the profits and I would be able to have my product available for sale across the nation. Win-win.

Unfortunately, things changed when a truck hit me while on the bike only 1.5 months into the trip. I had to go back home to recover and my chances of ever meeting any Dojo owners in person vanished. Besides, COVID was already making it pretty difficult. So, my only option was to find a new funnel for potential customers to TKC. I instantly thought of Etsy since – after selling one of the journals to one of my close friends – he said he could definitely see them do well there, given that they’re handmade and have a really unique look to them.

Motivated by the memory of his comment and my new-found energy, I updated my Etsy profile and wrote all the necessary descriptions and information for my journals, which was the only product I planned to sell. After publishing my shop and the sales page for the journals, I waited. As the time passed, I grew more and more anxious. Each day, I would check my account to see if I had made any sales, gotten any views. But there was nothing. Then the weeks started passing and still nothing. So I started getting frustrated. I didn’t know what had gone wrong. I had a beautiful product and had set it to what I thought was a fair price. I took the best pictures of it that I knew how and wrote an informative description which would field any questions I foresaw people having. I thought I had followed all the rules. At a loss, as I usually do, I started asking Google for advice.

And that’s when I started learning that to be successful on Etsy, you have to care about SEO and you definitely have to offer more than one product in your ship. Having one product just doesn’t make your shop look serious or legitimate, no matter how good it is. That made my heart sink. I had put so much time and effort into these journals, I couldn’t imagine having to go through that same process again to make other products. And the thought of doing SEO scared me. I was already familiar with the term and practice because of my time spent making my websites, but had purposely avoided it because it just wasn’t clicking for me and I thought that Etsy, which already has a pretty sizeable market of buyers who appreciate handmade things, would be a non-SEO solution to my needs.  I honestly expected to have people search “journal” on Etsy and have my product listed before them. So to read that this wasn’t the case was crushing.

But I took Google’s advice anyways. Or at least I tried.

Making more products didn’t end up being that bad, and actually turned out to be kind of enjoyable since I genuinely like journaling myself and enjoy art design. I even sometimes found myself in a flow state as thinking of and writing the affirmations and tips for maintaining good habits and a healthy lifestyle that would go into the inserts reaffirmed these things and practices within me.

But the SEO was a whole other story. It just didn’t make sense. Or it did, but it just didn’t feel true to me. It made me feel sales-y and fake. And, as I had experienced with UC, the whole idea of TKC began to feel contrived. What’s more, I started to tell myself that if I didn’t do SEO that I would never be able to sell any of my journals and that I would never succeed as a business owner. I told myself that the year I had already spent on TKC was a waste of time and that maybe I should just give up on it. This type of thinking spread outside of just my view of myself as an entrepreneur and started to affect my self-worth, too. I started to think I would never be good enough. That I just didn’t have the savvy to figure this SEO thing out and make it work for me. That I would never have enough money to live the life I wanted to live. That I would always be a failure, no matter how hard I tried.

And just like the reiteration of the affirmations and tips lifted my spirits, this sort of thinking made them plummet. Because the thing about humans is that we magnify the negative so much more than the positive. So, without me even consciously realizing it at first, I started feeling blocked again, only this time it manifested differently.

I didn’t stop working altogether, probably because I told myself it was too soon to take a break. I still did what I thought I had to do, but when the time came to publish or shine a light on all the work I had done, I froze. And I kept freezing. I just didn’t think it was ever good enough. And so I kept going back and tweaking things, finding reasons to postpone putting my work out in the world.

And what’s worse is that I had found out at some point that my journals were coming apart. The method I had used to bind the two sides of the journals together hadn’t stood the test of time. And this only confirmed my negative self-talk: that I couldn’t do anything right and no one would ever buy these journals. Why would they?

Despite all this, I put my head down and went to work. I researched possible solutions to the journals coming apart and, as soon as I found one, I started implementing it. But as I did so, I started homing in on all the other tiny mistakes I found, which over about 40 journals added up to what seemed to be a lot. A downward spiral had been triggered and I saw no end in sight.

Slowly, though, I started to become aware of my negative self-talk and the patterns in my life it created. I started noticing how self-defeating I had become, how unsure of my future and I started writing these realizations down whenever I would catch them in the moment. Not much started changing, though, until two weeks ago when I did a live guided meditation and the person guiding it felt called to say that the only thing to fear is fear itself. And that one simple, trite even, phrase broke me down. It cut right through my mental chatter and got to the heart of the matter. I could no longer hide from the truth.

What I had been experiencing these past four months was a vicious cycle of fear. Fear ruled me from the moment I woke up to the moment I went to sleep, and probably while I slept, too. It controlled my actions and informed my thoughts. It had its tight grip around me and it wouldn’t let go. The ego, it seemed, had won.

Until it was exposed to me for what it was during a time in which I was open to receiving the message. Only then was I able to integrate it because up until then, although I noticed my self-talk and felt dispirited, I only did so superficially. I never allowed myself to actually feel the fear, to sit with it. Because I was still scared of it. I still allowed myself to believe it had power over me.

But in that meditation two weeks ago, I allowed myself to acknowledge and practice the wisdom of surrender. As of two weeks ago, I’ve been sitting with my fear every morning during my practice of yoga of meditation and making every effort to be conscious of it and allow myself to feel it whenever I notice it. I’ve been noticing my triggers and actually allowing myself to process them. I’ve been doing the work.

And this isn’t to say that things are all sunshine and rainbows now. Actually, the opposite. If I learned anything at the very beginning of my spiritual practice when learning to process and sit with grief, it’s that these things take time and going into it with the expectation that it won’t only hinders the process. So, I’m fully prepared to allow myself to feel fear for the next several months and maybe even years. But you know what? Every time I do, I feel a little bit better and I know that once something has been integrated, it won’t likely resurface again. So, I rest easy in that knowledge and I commit myself to this way of life.

Because I don’t want to live a life that’s ruled by fear. I’ve been down that road too many times before. It’s all about control and maintaining control, even when you never had control to begin with, which leaves always feeling inadequate and fraught with anxiety.