More and more, I’ve been craving silence. The world is a noisy place, and I’ve been hungry for less noise and more heart. So, for Lent, I gave up listening to podcasts. It’s not that my listening was out of control, but I wanted to reduce the number of voices in my head. It’s easy to flip on a podcast, to temper the quiet with voices, even far away ones coming through earbuds or car speakers. It’s easy to take in more and more.
It’s not quite so easy to sit with silence and listen for something else.
The last few months have been hard, harder than I expected. I spent more than a month trying to salvage the relaunch of Hello There, Friend, but ultimately decided it wasn’t working and shut it down. This decision has been quiet, behind the scenes, where I’ve agonized and problem solved until the fog of it all grew so thick I couldn’t see anymore.
This isn’t the way it was supposed to go, I kept thinking. It shouldn’t be like this.
For a month and a half, I was obsessed, trying to figure out how to make it all work. The burden was heavy on me, too heavy, and I wondered if I had misread the cards, maybe counted too many aces. I thought this was it, the thing I was meant to do: to create a space for women to write about their own lives, a place of integrity and slowness and gratitude.
All the pieces fit together—the years of writing and editing, the photography, the self-employment. I had space in my life for this, and I wanted it so badly. This was it. I pushed all my chips into the center of the table, and I didn’t want to back down. I didn’t want to be wrong. I didn’t want to fail.
That’s not why I gave up podcasts for Lent but giving up podcasts was an extension of something bigger: I needed to stop searching for a way to make Hello There, Friend work when it clearly wasn’t. No one could give me the answer except for that little voice inside. And it said to stop, so I did. I stopped worrying about the project and did my best not to worry about who I was disappointing. I stopped lamenting the hours I’d spent, the years building up to this moment, the skill set and the business know-how. And I stopped listening to podcasts telling me the “right way” to do things.
When you do anything, you can take one of two approaches: you can follow the tried-and-true path, or you can go your own way. I’ve always been a go-your-own-way kind of person. I like figuring things out. I like listening to my intuition and curiosity and answering the call. But if you want to build something big, maybe start an ambitious project with hopes of making it into a business that might pay some of your bills, it seems prudent to follow at least some of the advice that’s out there. No need to reinvent the wheel.
It starts innocently enough. You find a resource—a podcast or a blog, maybe a Facebook group—and what you find there makes sense, so you dive in. They tell you to serve your ideal reader or ideal customer. They tell you to post on Instagram at least once a day, preferably at the same time each day. They tell you to build a brand, start an email list, keep showing up with pertinent content at regular intervals, all while serving this ideal, imagined consumer who needs what you’re creating.
Occasionally, they might remind you that you aren’t a machine, and need to rest and listen to that voice inside. And you might think that you’re doing that, even though the wheels are always turning in the back of your mind.
I bought it hook, line, and sinker. It was a cliché, and I hate clichés.
At the beginning, it made sense to heed the advice of those who came before me. They’ve already beaten a path through the woods—why make my own? Here’s why: that voice inside me never stopped whispering despite all my efforts to follow the beaten path. Despite all the noise, the voice persisted. It’s not a faucet that can be turned off and on at whim. It’s always there, always running in the hopes of keeping me full.
I don’t need other voices chattering in my ear. I need to listen to that voice inside. It’s quiet and unobtrusive. How can I hear it if I’m always listening to something else?
When I stilled the noise and realized it was time to end Hello There, Friend, I realized something inside me was aching. I had been trying my hardest to manage this project, fighting so hard for it that I couldn’t remember why I was doing it at all.
In January, I read a magazine article about purpose that threw me for a loop. Remember your why, it said, then listed a bunch of questions to contemplate to keep you on track. I couldn’t answer them. I could barely read the article. One question in particular asked me to consider what the world would be like if I weren’t in it. The more I thought about it, the angrier I got. What exactly am I doing here?
I still can’t answer that one.
One night, I poured myself a glass of wine and sat at the computer to write. I wanted to write about failure, about how I put everything I had into this project and it failed. I wrote about Samuel Beckett’s quote, the one my grad school professor would tell us time and again:
“Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”
When I read it, the first two sentences have question marks instead of periods. Ever tried? Ever failed? (Well, have you? Because haven’t we all?)
But, no, they are statements, not questions. Ever tried. Ever failed. Ever meaning always, constantly, endlessly, continuously. It could read: Always tried. Always failed. Or, endlessly tried. Endlessly failed.
I have tried and tried and tried, and failed and failed and failed.
And, yes, this is true. It’s not the failure I struggle so much with. Like Beckett says, failure is inevitable. You pick yourself up and try again. What bugs me is how hard I tried, how much of myself I put into this, how I believed this might be the Thing (with a capital T!). I went all in, and it was too much. Less than six months, and it’s over.
And it sucks.
A friend wrote me to tell me she thinks something will be birthed from this, something that’s been waiting to be born. At first, I brushed her comment aside, but I’ve spent more time thinking about the metaphor. How long pregnancy can feel, how uncomfortable. How it takes a toll on your body for months, with the ultimate explosion of birth. The process is painful, and after it’s all over, you are never the same. You’ve experienced something, and it’s changed you. And, if you’re lucky, something beautiful came out of it.
I’m still hoping for that while I linger here waiting for what’s next. Will something be birthed from this? What will it be? Right now, all of that is unclear. I tried. I failed. At some point, I will try again. For now, I’m resting, listening to that quiet whisper and no podcasts, allowing this to run its course, no matter how painful or upending or astonishing it might be.
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