2025 begins

I started a journey in May of 2024. I jumped because staying was no longer an option. I have been working a full time job since I was 15 years old, and I just turned 60 this past September. Even writing this seems strange. I don’t know if aging has changed my view of how i live and what I want or want to tolerate. I just know that in June of 2021 I left my job of going on 23 years for what I thought was going to be a dream job. A job that would allow me to incorporate my herbal business into my life in a new way. Two months in and it was a nightmare and I left immediately. I didn’t want to waste time again believing something would change.

What became my reality was I couldn’t get anyone to even give me a job interview. So in the meantime a wonderful friend let me work on her farm to help pay my bills. After a few months I got a job in a local Coop in the kitchen. I had never worked in a kitchen but I learn quickly. You have to really thrive in chaos to work in a kitchen, I don’t. I moved onto the bakery which then became intolerable due to some interpersonal issues that I couldn’t resolve on my own and no one seemed interested in helping with. After weeks of coming home crying my husband told me that you’re so miserable. Just quit and take money from your 401k and figure it out. This had never ever even occurred to me, so I jumped!

i decided to focus on what I love my herbal business I had created in 2019 but hadn’t been able to fully focus on with a full time job, home, and life. This has brought me so many revelations about myself, how I work, what I focus on. For the first time in my life I was free to schedule myself as I wanted. To follow a rhythm that honored my body, my cycles. No more getting up at 3:30 am to do everything needed to get to work on time. No more working every holiday and Sunday. No more white knuckling it to work in bad weather.

I never realized how depleted my spirit and body were. I am lucky that I had this money and I budgeted for 10 months to see what I could do. I am pretty stubborn and very hard working. Yet the reality is I am a one woman show and doing everything that is needed to run a herbal business is a ton. I don’t make enough to hire help, or media, or accounting. Just making, growing, harvesting, bottling, labeling is a lot in itself. I thought to get a part time job because I am enjoying the freedom I have never had. I thought then I could focus still on what I love, my herbal business.

Yet either I get no call back interviews, or I don’t get the job. I jumped which is not like me. I grew up with a lot of money insecurity. So making sure to have a home, food, insurance, security had always been a priority. A priority even over my mental and emotional well being.

So I go into this year with great hope that my jump has a soft landing or a parachute! Because I won’t go back to that person who was willing to give up her soul for security. So I say to 2025 I am here and I will be joyful in what I do. If people can’t see my worth or my business’s worth, then they are not my people. I do what I love for myself and the plants and what we both offer.