Reading the tea leaves
learning to lean into what's working
This summer has taken me by surprise. It shouldn’t have, but it did. I thought it would be simple and chill and low stress.
I was wrong. I was dreaming.
I should have known better, but gearing up for the last quarter/Holiday season; what’s coming next (you’ll see in September) I’ve just been in a bit of a constant pinch. I’m getting better. It’s legitimately getting better. I know I’ve talked about trying to get a handle on things for… years. SO many years. But after almost a full year of working with Moda, I’m really starting to get the hang of it all, but can you blame a girl for wanting to slow down?
I had a deadline in June that I missed. I had grand plans for a collection that hasn’t materialized yet. So I was given an extension with a few ideas that I threw out. One of them stuck and I was good to go!
I thought it would be simple and that I could do it in no time flat, just like I thought it would be a relaxing summer.
I was wrong. I was dreaming.
It’s an (unspecified at this time) holiday theme and I already have so much really good work from my paper goods, so I thought I’d just transfer it over to fabric and give myself a little pat on the back and take a nap.
It’s just that it didn’t quite work like that.
Nothing does.
Instead, I tried to make it work for too long. There’s something about trying to fit paper onto fabric and fabric onto paper that doesn’t exactly work. It feels like it should, but when the paper goods are specific/diecut shapes, it makes it a little challenging. I’m always up for a good challenge, but this just wasn’t working. I hung on to the thing that wasn’t quite working for too long, thinking I could just solve the problem.
But the problem wasn’t that I couldn’t solve the problem, the problem was I wasn’t supposed to solve the problem, I was supposed to move on. Use it as a stepping stool.
Does that make sense?
I’ve found this a lot in my life. In fact it’s something that I have lectured on. The question: Is this just hard or is this the wrong way? And how do you know the difference?
It has taken a long time, but I think I’m starting to understand the difference. It’s easy to understand in hindsight. The signs, the feelings… but as I’ve bumped into more of these proverbial forks in the road in my life, it’s getting a little more straight forward to know which is which.
When things are meant to be, even if they’re challenging, there is ease and peace there. There’s less anxiety. It doesn’t mean it isn’t work, often it’s more work, which was part of the hemming and hawing to begin with; it just means that there isn’t so much resistance. It’s open doors.
If things are hard and almost certainly not meant to be there seems to be a brick wall in your thoughts and a frustration. It’s closed doors.
These two things feel completely different. If you can get out of your way, and release the expectations of what you thought the solution was, what will be is a better path.
I think why I fought it for so long with this new unspecified holiday collection (a few weeks) is actually because I legitimately wanted it to be easy. I didn’t want to make new work if I didn’t have to. When I can, I’m all about making my work work for me these days, and I couldn’t wrap myself around making a new body of work.
When I finally said, “this isn’t working,” and had a good think about what might work, immediately a new idea came to me. Something that had been on a back burner in my mind. And when I tried to say, ok, I’ll do this thing and just fill in the other things with my other work, the wall went up. As I followed the path of the new work it became clear, that the rest of the patterns would come from the new work I was making.
What followed was magic and some of the best work I’ve ever made. I can’t believe I had it in me. My sweet family left me and went north to be with family and friends so I could work it out. I felt like an actual real life princess with 24 hours a day to myself for an entire week. I haven’t had time to myself like that for nearly 10 years! I couldn’t have done it without that space. Certainly not in the amount of time that I had left before my extended deadline.
It’s in the can now. A real triumph.
It’s very cool to look back on the past couple of weeks and see that I’ve grown. That I was able to pivot fast than I have in the past, and the results are DAZZLING.
Thanks for reading!
I’ll be back every week starting next week, once my little goose is back to school, which I feel terribly sad about. Glad for some time to get things done, glad she’ll be with friends everyday, and just super sad that she’ll be away.
xoxoxlizzy
Ps. These images are not hints.
I’d love to hear from you about how you distinguish between something that’s just plain hard, and something that not meant to be?
This really resonated with me. I left a job I loved and hated, last December. Two months before, I stopped by a church before work. I sat in the quiet and I made a list of “deal breakers.” I thought, if any of these things happen, I will walk away. When I left, I thought, “hmm, and it wasn’t anything on my list that caused me to leave.” About a month later, I reviewed my list… all of it had happened. So, my new rule to live by, “If you feel like you need to make a list of deal breakers, it’s already time to walk away.”
I am excited to see your new collection! It’s a great thing when we can unstick the dams we build in our minds.
I definitely struggle with myself over sunk cost fallacy. “I’ve done all this work, I have to make it happen!” (The irony is, I’m great at encouraging others to cut their losses!) I have a tendency of either go hard or go home, and I have to check in with myself when I want to “go home”: is it because it’s hard? Is it because it’s unfamiliar? Or is it because it’s not working and I need to step back? Sometimes I find myself pulling back from things I actually want to do, because the inertia of getting started has me stuck. But a walk always helps. Or good music. Or a cup of tea and some time with the dog. 💕