The Shadow Hunter

So... I need to be honest. This blog took days to write.  This is because my computer keeps yelling at me. A box with an urgent yellow triangle in the right hand corner of my screen kept  aggressively appearing with: YOUR DISK IS ALMOST FULL. SAVE SPACE BY OPTIMIZING STORAGE. Oy.   (IGNORE) I’ve moved documents and folders to the cloud, but my computer has a woefully tiny drive and every giant PDF and powerpoint I download for work eats that right up.   Finally, I surrendered to the yellow triangle, and t he act of moving and removing files was actually a cathartic process.  Each file I moved or deleted brought up a new memory. Some memories were very happy, others I greeted with an audible sigh of relief.  Here’s the thing about memories. They are in the past.  The initial pain, or happiness, whatever emotion they caused -- now presents a mirror to you — it is an echo of what you felt before. You can never feel THAT thing again — joy, grief, pain, excitement, anger — for better for wo

They say hindsight is 20/20, right? But I'm beginning to see that intuition is a hundred times stronger...its like hindsight and foresight combined (with some night vision thrown in there for fun)! It's really that powerful...the key is trusting it.  In Fall 2020 I pretty much flat out refused to listen to my intuition. I was VERY stubborn, but looking back, I learned a valuable lesson.  After I got back to the United States after working remotely in South America, my long-term freelance contract with a large agency in Milwaukee ended. They had offered me a generous full-time position, but deep inside I knew it wasn't for me. I declined the offer, and started tentatively building my business. I'd been wanting to start my own brand strategy business for years, and I finally had, but admittedly, I was afraid of allowing it to grow.  I was afraid of branching out and networking and actually finding new business connections and staying with one agency just seemed so much...

I used to think of gratitude like I was quickly scribbling out a thank you note to a friend (...my doctor's-esque scroll is  mostly legible...its the thought that counts!).  I’d be thankful for something that a person did for me or gifted to me, so I’d shoot off a quick and friendly thank you to that person and move on to the next thing. It was efficient and polite, but rather…short lived.   Or, I’d sign an email with “thanks!” — but is that really gratitude? Are we grateful for them reviewing the document and sending detailed feedback? (In advertising? Probably not…!) Then, there’s Thanksgiving. The day when we’re supposed to be grateful for everything. But that’s only one day a year, and we’re often on a turkey-high so the gratitude fades a bit.   This year, I learned that gratitude is so much more than that. It’s actually a way of life, an energetic current.   When I’m grateful for what I have on a continual, daily basis, good things flow. And when I’m not actively practicing gr

Happy Christmas season, friends! As everyone gets ready for Christmas, you're probably thinking of all the things you need prepare for others by the end of the week.  Do you have a list of things to get done?  I know, it can be a lot! However, take a moment and think about this...what gift are you giving to yourself this year?  Have you thought about what YOU want?  We're often so hard on ourselves. We often ignore what we want in favor of what others need from us.  And what we deliver to others needs to be "perfect". I get it. I'm a Virgo, it is literally in my nature to be a perfectionist. I used to judge myself by my own standards of perfection: at work (I once had a client tell me I was "overly thorough"...wait, that's not a good thing?!)... at home (I used to own 4 vacuums and religiously clean every Saturday. I had a friend tell me once they would feel comfortable eating off of my kitchen floor haha)... in friendships or relationships, etc.  If