🌿 The Grove Journals #31
Open for Official Business — On the week the last tether snapped
There’s a particular silence that arrives after a door closes.
Not the loud silence of aftermath — the kind that rings in your ears after something dramatic. This is the quieter kind. The kind that arrives when something that has been loosening for a long time finally, gently, lets go. You feel it in your chest first. A slight opening. Like a breath you didn’t know you were holding.
That’s what this week felt like.
The last thread of hourly work — the kind with a guaranteed number attached, the kind that shows up in your bank account on a schedule regardless of what you created or how many readers found you — that thread is gone now. Finished. Not cut in anger, not lost in crisis. Just... done. A chapter that ran its course.
And in the same week, I took my first official client under my own new company name.
I want to sit with that for a second, because I think we move past these moments too fast.
My new company has its first client. Not a favor. Not a handshake agreement in a hallway. A real client, with real work, with a Phase 2 conversation already on the horizon — because apparently when you do good work, people notice, and when people notice, they want more of it. (and… they tell others)
The timing is not a coincidence. It never is.
Here’s what I’ve been thinking about all week, in the in-between moments when the tech work was running and the Bear Bones Tarot post was open and the quiet of the house was doing what it does:
A safety net and a tether are not the same thing.
I spent a long time calling that hourly income a safety net. And maybe it was, once. In the early days of rebuilding, having something guaranteed — even something small — is the thing that keeps you breathing while you build everything else. There’s no shame in that. Safety nets are not weakness. They’re how you survive long enough to grow.
But somewhere along the way, the net became a tether.
Not because anyone meant it to. Not because anything bad happened. Just because the presence of a guaranteed thing — however small — becomes a quiet voice in the back of your mind that says you don’t have to go all in yet. You still have this. And that voice, gentle as it is, keeps you from throwing your full weight onto the thing you’re actually building.
The tether is gone now. And what I notice — genuinely, honestly notice, in the place where the fear would usually live — is not falling. It’s solid ground.
I pull the Two of Cups this morning for Sovereign Sunday. The card of mutual recognition. Of two forces meeting each other clearly, seeing each other fully, entering into a sacred exchange as equals. I pull it on a solo Sunday, home with my cats and my coffee, the house quiet, the data spreadsheet open.
And I think — oh. This is a card about me seeing myself.
Because that’s what this week asked for, more than anything. Not bravery in the dramatic sense. Not hustle or grit or any of the words we use when we want to make struggle sound glamorous. Just... clarity. Clear eyes about what I have built. Clear eyes about what I’m capable of. A genuine, mutual-recognition moment between the version of me that survived everything and the version of me who is standing here now, ready to build something that lasts.
I said something to myself this week that I want to share, because I think some of you might need to hear it too:
If I can survive failure on an epic scale — (and I have, more than once) — then I have more than enough capability to handle the success I want.
Read that again. Slowly.
Because I think a lot of us — rebuilders, restarters, people who have been knocked sideways by life and chose to get back up — we spend so much energy proving we can survive the hard things that we forget to prepare for the good things. We’ve trained for the floor giving way. We haven’t trained for the ceiling lifting.
The ceiling is lifting. And it’s time to stop playing small… because the tether is gone. The door is open. I am — scared and clear and choosing to believe in what I built — open for business. 🐾
🔒 The real version of this week — the actual numbers, the actual fear, and what it actually felt like inside the quiet — For the paid subscribers who showed up for the unfiltered version. Below is what the week actually looked like, what the numbers actually said, and what I plan to do about it.
