A Virtual House Fire

Growing up I had this HUGE fear of a fire consuming our home, my beloved stuffed animals, all my memories, and my piggy bank; leaving me with nothing to my identity and no “stuff” that had shaped me to who I am today. In 2018 I experienced my greatest fear… in a way.

No, thank heavens, my house DID NOT catch on fire, but I had a virtual house fire. Working on social media, planning these virtual media methods of business, I was caught off guard when, in the course of five days, I lost everything. Absolutely everything.

In this loss, I lost my identity and my future goals, plans and hopes. I had been working for over nine months on my podcast. It was my new medium brain child, I had involved tons of people and then, I lost it.

Nobody from my team got back to me.
The band from Texas who had worked with me to give me the theme song backed out (two days before the welcome launch).
My co-host lost faith in the process and had a change of heart and didn’t respond to anything I sent for the podcast.

And I was lost. So lost. I lost all hope. I lost all belief. Man it was hard.

So what do you do?

Shoot, I don’t know! I guess what you do in any house fire. I took time for grief. I think that if I hadn’t of done this, which isn’t something that I normally do, I would have been just wiping up the spilled milk without ever picking up the tipped over milk bottle. I think I would have hurriedly been trying to cover my tracks but never actually taking a breath, thinking these through, and moving forward with a plan of action.

I went to church. I prayed to God. I asked for help.

In fact, the lesson that I learned in Church I wrote an entire blog about here. It was about taking other people’s responsibility from them. I had been doing that. I had been prideful of doing that to other people but it wasn’t helping me in the long run, it wasn’t helping anyone!

When I say that I let myself grieve, I make it sound like I had the maturity to take some time, be sad, but it wasn’t like that. In fact, it was more revealed in the sense that I couldn’t stop crying. I’m not really a crier but yet, here I was, crying ALL day, EVERY day, to the point that for the first time since I don’t know when, I had to cancel TWO meetings because I couldn’t stop crying. Yup. That’s how bad it was.

I was feeling so hurt emotionally that I PHYSICALLY felt it. God forced me to take a moment. I made a couple calls for help to my mentors and was able to get back on track. Get on track with an idea that would maybe work better for the podcast after all but something that had stressed me out greatly. I am excited for the opportunities that can come forward, and the only thing that I hope is that those who dropped out or didn’t respond or lost faith, don’t have a change of heart and want back in, because I can’t go back to where I once was. How am I ever to trust them again?

Because if your house fire starts because of lint in the dryer, you’re probably always going to have that worry in the back of your mind when it comes to the dryer. I have forgiven and moved on but, with my name, my brand and my business attached to this; I have to move forward and maintain what is right for my business.