I've heard people tell their origin stories. The polished version. The one that sounds like a TED talk. "I had a vision. I took a leap. I never looked back."
That's not mine.
Mine starts with hate. Strong word, I know. But I'm going to use it anyway because it's the honest one. I had a marketing agency. I had built it. I had clients, systems, a functioning business. And somewhere along the way I started dreading the walk up to my office every morning.
Not everything. I loved the technology side — there was always something new, something to figure out. But chasing clients? Following up on invoices? Selling myself, again, to someone who needed convincing? I was done. I just didn't know I was done yet.
One day I went downstairs and told my husband I wanted to close it.
He said yes.
That's it. That was the whole conversation. I had been building up to it for months, rehearsing the case I'd need to make, bracing for the negotiation. And he just said yes.
So I closed it.
And then I was completely, utterly lost.
I want to be honest about that part because nobody talks about it. You leave the thing that was making you miserable and you think you're going to feel free. Sometimes you do. And then a week later you're just... in your house. With no meetings. No clients needing things. No structure that tells you what Tuesday is supposed to look like.
I was painting. I had been painting. But I wasn't taking it seriously — not really. It was still a hobby in my head even if I had technically just made it my job. I was playing. Learning. Having fun but not committed. There's a version of that that's fine, and there's a version that's avoidance, and I was firmly in the second one.
Then I found mixed media. Abstract painting. The layering — building a surface with acrylics and ink and oil sticks and dry pigments, covering things and uncovering them, letting the work fight back and then following where it wanted to go.
Something clicked.
Not a gentle click. The kind that changes the acoustics of the room
I think what happened is this: I had spent years being very good at things I didn't love. Marketing, at its best, is creative. It involves real psychology, real craft. I was good at it.
But good-at-something and made-for-something are not the same thing, and I had been confusing them.
The painting was the first thing in a long time where I couldn't see the ceiling. Where the better I got, the more there was to learn. Where I would finish a piece and instead of feeling finished, feel like I was finally starting.
I closed my agency so I could be me. I didn't know that when I made the decision. I thought I was just exhausted. But that's what it turns out I was doing.
The in-between — the lost months, the hobby-not-a-job phase, the not-knowing — that wasn't wasted time. That was the work.
The necessary part. The thing that had to happen before the thing that was actually mine could show up.
I think about that a lot now.
If you're in your own version of this — the part that comes after you left something but before you know what's next — you're not behind. You're in it. That's exactly where you're supposed to be.
— Kim