For The Not Ready Creative

Part nine: Bother us with your brilliance: your art, your weird, your “too out there” ideas—your disruptions to the status quo

Mar 04, 2025

The following post is part of a Seed Pod collaboration about failure. Seed Pods are a SmallStack community project designed to help smaller publications lift each other up by publishing and cross-promoting around a common theme. We’re helping each other plant the seeds for growth!

It was winter. Early 2020.

Right before we all knew the entirety of what 2020 would be. When it still seemed a mistake from which we’d awake.

The hallway outside was dark, and my wife, Cam, and I might’ve been the only people in the five-story building, unusual for the middle of the week. It was cold—the radiators had abandoned their post. The deep teal walls of my massage studio were mourning the detached weavings, bright yarn in piles to pack and return to the artist. The rarely used fluorescents harsh overheard as we collapsed six years of accumulated massage therapy equipment, books, work/life imbalance, to pack into our Matrix hatchback parked four floors below on the desolate downtown street.

Cam had read the latest—the governor has extended the shelter in place order another 30 days.

I don’t know how long I stood there.

Just a month before, I’d set in motion my carefully crafted plan (involving moving my studio to my home) to slowly exit my massage therapy business without blowing up my life. Things were not going according to the plan.

The part of me that thought they could summon safety with proper planning had had the rug wrenched out from under. A quieter part of me was relieved.

I would love to tell you that this was the moment I stopped playing it safe and started listening to my inner Artist ...but they'd been silenced too long to be heard above the frenzied replanning of my safety engineer, or as one might call them—The Not Ready.

I don’t want to tell you about the months that followed, the frantic attempted resuscitation of my dead massage practice alongside the desperate clinging to anything whiffing of success (that bit lasted for years).

If you’re in a similar moment now, or if you’re in a moment of contemplating intentionally pulling the rug out and feeling Not Ready…

This past October, inspired by a prompt from Jeannine Ouellette’s The Letter Reimagined (it’s a paid post, but her prompts are well worth it), I wrote a letter from me now to to past me as their business crumbled. The letter I wish I had in 2020:

Remember to let yourself feel as the rug is pulled out; let yourself lay down in a ball and cry until the tears run out; don’t rush to make plans or strategize a new way forward, no matter how urgently the world pushes you to; don’t get swept in someone else's timeline, someone else’s optimism, someone else's revenue goal; stay down for as long as you need; your body will know when it’s time to stand, to walk, to dance into your next chapter; but that time is not now and if you try to jump ahead, if you rush past the pain, you will be grieving for years to come; it will hit in unexpected waves as each new thing you try, each new foundation you dig is swept away, crumbles in your hands like sand; until you finally allow yourself to feel.

I wonder if “The Not Ready” is really…

“The Needs to Know” whatever change we’re considering will really Be Worth It.

Or rather: “The Terrified They Will Fail” to make life richer, more enjoyable, more easeful…and so clinging to the things that aren’t working feels preferable to feeling the pain of trying and failing.

I guess what I’m asking is: Are you really not ready or are you tolerating your current level of discomfort (which you know you can “handle”) in an attempt to avoid the imagined grief of possibly failing—all while ensuring failure?

I guess what I’m really asking is: what if you let yourself feel?

Discussion about this post

Ready for more?