Erin Louise Carson DeWolfe

I notice that a lot of times when I look back on my past self, I feel ashamed of and disappointed by my behaviour. It is difficult for my current incarnation to be charitable to that girl, and young woman, who hadn’t learned better yet.

Our elders can share their experiences with us, and mine did, but for me – most of the time, I ignored them. I never really learned the truth of a thing until I bore a painful enough consequence of denying it. When that sting landed, the truth of my elders’ words awoke in me. Belatedly I saw their wisdom.

Subconsciously realizing I was ignorant, I felt I must be broken and in need of fixing. Vaguely grasping that I learned through pain, I sought as much of it as possible. My desire to awaken manifested as a voracious masochism for things taboo, uncomfortable or fear-inducing. I always felt anxious, like any time spent inside my comfort zone was somehow wasted. What a fearful but brave person I was. How hard I fought for awareness.

I’m tired of compartmentalizing my young self. She didn’t always make good decisions, but she did learn from the bad ones, and that’s all any of us can do. I wish to practice compassion for myself and the missteps of my youth. I will work to correct my thinking about my past.

I think this practice will help me be more compassionate toward others who are imperfectly, often painfully, finding their own way. Even – maybe especially – when they won’t listen to me.

Midlife crisis has come to me on the early side, and just as well I get it over with. I’m no novice to this. The existential madness isn’t going to take me down easy. The madness seeps from the path not taken… the realization that you only have one life, that you will die and there’s still so much you want to do. You question everything and you wonder if you made the right decisions, or what life would be like had you decided differently.

You may feel you’ve lost so much but you yourself are not, and can never be, lost. No matter how low you go, how much despair you feel, you can give your suffering meaning if you look it square in its ugly face and learn what it’s trying to teach you. The ranker the shit, the better the fertilizer. You can grow a garden from processed pain.

All life has suffering but I am not here to suffer meaninglessly. I’m not here to let my pain be for nothing. I’m gonna learn, and I’m not going to let anything threaten what’s most precious to me. I’m here for Shawn, my kids, my family, my kitty, my work and its value, my friends and my growth. I’m here for a better and happier future.

There are many times in my life when I have erased what was before and consigned it to a box to be opened in another life or on another plane. I have started and deleted a lot of blogs and burned journals and letters. Every few years I delete old social media accounts and eventually start new ones. (I didn’t grow up with social media. I find it can easily hook me and drag me off on a mental tangent.) It’s a sort of reset I have to do every few years because otherwise I get too internally cluttered.

So with that introduction, this is now the new first post on this site.

This year I have to focus on one thing: business. I am putting my business first, because the things I want most are for us to pay off our debts, become financially free, own land and a home, and get our time back. I want to spend time doing things I love and enjoying the company of my friends and family. I want to be able to relax. As long as you are in debt you are not your own master and it’s difficult to relax at all.

I am pretty good at the grind in the short term but I don’t have the kind of staying power Shawn (who has been doing this for a couple decades) has. So I hope to be somewhere very different in a year from now.

We are starting the year by trying to tie up some old business and intractable problems that have been taking large amounts of our time and energy and money in 2021. It has been a year of learning experiences about what not to do. But we have also had some really wonderful clients, projects, friendships, encounters and experiences over the past year that brought us joy.

The world under late capitalism is a very difficult place for most people to make their way in. I read news stories about workers everywhere throwing down their tools and saying “this trade I’m making is not worth it.” Everyone’s exhausted, but that exhaustion also helps us look for simpler and gentler ways to be. That’s what I’m looking for too, in 2022. If I use my generative powers to help reconfigure the business from what I learned since we launched in 2021, we can make our lives easier and our business better. But to do that I have to keep my sh*t together mentally and not get distracted.

GOALS & PLANS

My first goal this year is to rebrand and rebuild the website to match our new attitude and offerings. Our emphasis, I have learned, should be less about being friendly (which, I mean, we still are) and more about being competent and trustworthy. Thus the cute dog logo is getting retired to a comfy couch and replaced with something more appropriate. The site also needs to run very clean and be a model of good design.

As for offerings, our products will be whittled down and we will prioritize marketing site maintenance, offering site design as a side item. (Maintenance clients are our easiest, happiest and most profitable clients.) Design will always require a lump payment upfront to cover our employee’s wages as they build, but it will be a competitive upfront cost offset by a 1 – 3 year maintenance contract.

Simple marketing/brochure pages are very reasonable as they are easy (and honestly fun) to build. Sites with ecommerce, booking systems, reservation systems, and other business processes come at a premium because they take a lot more labour to build and can be troublesome.

Our hourly a la carte rate for both businesses will go up once the new site launches. We will send out notice to our clients in advance.

We need to really whittle down and modernize our IT toolkit to only the best, easiest and most reliable system on the market today. We have some chaff to sort through. And we need to consolidate our online resources under one or two user identities.

Some things we build in-house with various plugins such a WooCommerce may be better served getting outsourced to subscription-based 3rd party services; businesses that deal specifically with that one business function and offer responsive support. It’s true those services often have certain limitations. In most cases though, the customer would probably prefer us to get the site done quickly and leave out some of their “nice to haves”, rather than build a custom solution in order to accommodate a few peccadilloes. For customers who only want a custom solution, we will have to charge them a lot more, we may outsource for some of the work, or (my preference) we just send them elsewhere.

Our onboarding procedure will be thorough. We will ask detailed questions about what the website needs to do. I have learned that clients don’t understand or convey the complexity of their requests (because they don’t know how tech works). What they think of as a “form” may actually be a complex, multi-step, multi-path business process. The right questions would reveal that distinction. Charging clients an out-of-the-box price – for what turns out during the build to be a highly customized solution – has become much too costly for us.

If a client will require a custom solution, or has no idea what they need or how to describe it, we will charge them to help determine what they need, and for the research and writing labour for a thorough proposal and timeline. If they know very clearly what they want, it’s fairly straightforward and a template solution suffices, we can skip this step.

There are more ideas I have but I think those are the most important.