This Is How You Walk the Path of Purpose
Hello, my name is Jessica, and I may have picked the hardest job.
Truth time: This week I had a real moment of frustration and, to be honest, “sorry for myself.”
I love the business I am building, Glissade, with all my heart. The last several years have walked me back, in a way, to my original essence: an elegant, color-drenched, dance-through-life, vintage-influenced love of fashion and aesthetics and making beautiful things. Glissade is a brand of dresses & skirts inspired by dancing, but made for real life. As I like to say, it’s things that you wear on the dance floor AND go to brunch in.
But walking the path of purpose the last few years has also been one of the hardest things I’ve done. Before this place of greater clarity, I made many mistakes, took so many wrong turns and detours. I’ve done a lot of it alone. It’s challenged me spiritually, and practically. And, oh yeah—the path of purpose will also bring up everything single thing of yours that’s holding you back. All your shit, everything you struggle with, every limitation. It’s not for the faint of heart.
The path of purpose isn’t logical or linear. It’s not doing things for a known outcome. It’s walking on a path that’s never been trodden, not knowing quite where it will lead, except for some inner sense that you really want to explore it. You find yourself delighted at the flowers you see along the path. The trees speak to you. And… it’s sometimes dark and scary and uncharted and you have no fucking idea where it will end up.
The path of purpose is learning to fully embody the things you could never not be (except for the fact that we can, and do, spend lifetimes avoiding and ignoring and discounting our true essence things and “wasting" quite a lot of time). It’s not what you “could” do; it’s what you can’t not do. It’s not building a business because you saw people on the internet be successful entrepreneurs; it’s doing the things that you would do even if no one saw it or bought it. If you were on a mountain top with no one to see, no one to care or approve or disapprove or even sign up as a client, no money to be made, no social media, no nice title or success to flaunt to people at dinner parties… what would you still be doing? (I’m suspending disbelief here and letting you have all the resources you need for your path of purpose on this hypothetical mountain.)
I would still be writing, even if no one read it. I would still be obsessing over vintage Vogues and watching old movies and scouring vintage fabric for inspiration. I would still be taking vintage dress sketches and tweaking them slightly and creating a new, perfect design that feels both vintage and fresh. I would still be devising the perfect thing to wear on the boat to Catalina, or in a Swiss chalet in winter, or on the dance floor. I would still be decorating imaginary 1920s houses with custom wallpaper and antique light fixtures. And I would be doing it all while dancing, dancing, dancing through life (to music mostly prior to 1960).
I’m weird. But I’m ME.
(Hint: If you trace the path of purpose back in time, you will find the path often reveals itself early. If you met me as a teenager, I was writing on a typewriter in the dining room while sipping tea from a vintage tea cup and wearing 1950s vintage cocktail dresses on the weekend while baking cookies and listening to Frank Sinatra… no lie.)
The path of purpose is an amazing return to true essence self… and it’s also the hardest thing I’ve ever done. (Except maybe for inner-city school teaching… that was probably harder.) Yesterday, mired in the slowest re-re-do of a dress pattern that has required much tweaking, bogged down by a to-do list for @shopglissade that is 100 miles long, and watching the taxes go out and the expenses accumulate… I admit, I felt sorry for myself. I am doing almost every piece of building the business myself (which in some ways I don’t mind, I like the challenge of getting curious and figuring out how to do new things), but that also means it takes forever. You spend the weekend fixing a dress pattern for the third time, and then you re-do the teaser video on the “coming soon” website and order muslin and follow up with the seamstress for pricing info and the day is gone and you still have 500 things to do before you can even think about being ready to sell something. And you have to do your freelance work to make ends meet and then you’re trying to figure out summer income when that seasonal work wanes and on top of it all, I AM DOING IT ALL ALONE. That was the biggest piece of frustration for me yesterday.
Being an entrepreneur is never easy for anyone, I know. Getting a salaried job and kind of phoning it in and getting a regular paycheck and health insurance is infinitely easier; that’s why more people do that than start businesses.
But the thing that really got me was: A lot (ok, not all) of those brave entrepreneurs have someone to help and support them. They have a spouse or at least a significant other to help with the rent or at least make some dinners and tidy up the kitchen while they toil away extra hours on the business. Someone to at least give them a back rub and cheer them on a little.
Truth be told… I am really sick of doing it all on my own. I am sick of doing all my own pattern adjustments and my own photography and modeling and scrubbing the bathtub and fixing dinner and dealing with putting the cat down alone and having no one there with me through it all.
Weirdly, this in no way makes me want to quit the business or throw in the towel. Not at all. It almost stubbornly strengthens my resolve: There is nothing you could throw at me that could make me want to stop doing this. I will do it no matter what, even if I have to fight through thorns.
But I don’t want to fight. I want to feel supported.
And so, on the brutal path of purpose, that is my edge, my next level, my next lesson.
What is getting in the way of me feeling supported? How can I better support myself, and allow support to find me?
What in me still contributes to my aloneness? For, if you know me or even just read to the end of my writings on the internet, you will perhaps know that aloneness is a theme for me in life.
So I will allow myself my moment of feeling all the sorry-for-myself feelings. And then I will go deeper, go past. What in me is still creating a reality of feeling unsupported? And how can I show up differently?
For the key to building a business from thin air, I think, is 1) to love it so much that you have to do it, no matter what, and 2) a high tolerance for uncertainty and discomfort.
And to be honest, I’m winning at both, no matter my despairing days and moments of frustration.
Single entrepreneurs, I see you. You are the strongest, bravest kind out there.
Art by Andrew Judd