 Good God, y’all, I cannot believe it’s been a year since I last posted on my blog. The lull was initially unintentional — a result of my energy being focused on other projects and priorities. To my few but mighty readers, my apologies for leaving this space unattended for so long.
At the beginning of March, I was all set to regale you with news about some personal and professional milestones: My eight-year anniversary as a thriving entrepreneur and freelance media consultant. An exciting and long-awaited home improvement project. A new, super fun gig in the arts. Plus, y’know, the most important announcement of them all — I cut off all my hair and dyed it platinum. Then COVID hit.
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 I’m super lucky I get to do what I love for a living, and I’m extremely thankful that I get to do it on my own terms. Every time my little marketing and public relations business successfully completes another 365-day journey around the sun, I consider it to be a major milestone.
Six years ago this month, I quit my last corporate job and went out on my own as a freelance writer and media consultant. It is still the best career decision I ever made. Read all about my big leap into entrepreneurship here. Every single day without exception, I wake up happy to go to work. My heart positively overflows with gratitude for the life and career I have somehow managed to create for myself. (Gross, I know. Go ahead and roll your eyes. I’ll wait.)  There’s this marginally entertaining 1991 movie, “Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead,” that stars Christina Applegate as Sue Ellen, a teenager who has to go to work to support her siblings when the babysitter her mom hired for the summer suddenly dies. In a not-at-all believable turn of events, Sue Ellen gets a job as an assistant at a fashion design company.
At one point, Sue Ellen’s boss, Rose, tells her that the only correct response to anything she asks her to do is, “I’m right on top of that, Rose.” So she says this over and over throughout the film. While the movie is not worth much more than the celluloid it’s printed on, Sue Ellen’s canned reply is pure gold. It has stuck with me for 25 years because it IS me.  The transition from one year to the next is when many of us take time to reflect. I am no different. I like to look back to see how far I’ve come.
For me, 2015 was pretty outstanding on the whole. Sure, there are things I could’ve done differently, but I don’t believe in regrets. Every stumble is a lesson, not a reason for self-flagellation. I wrapped up three years as an entrepreneur in September, and I can now unequivocally say that my little freelance media consulting business is a viable venture. I had my highest billings ever and earned more income than I ever pulled down in a single year before. I’m no longer just paying my bills and surviving, I’m friggin’ thriving, people. It feels awesome. I’m either lucky, smart or both.  I’ve had a lifelong love-hate relationship with a certain, seemingly innocuous word.
"Cute" is today’s universal term for aesthetic admiration, and I think it’s gotten totally out of hand. My shoes are cute. My haircut is cute. My bungalow in the Highlands is cute. I just bought a cute set of dinnerware. But me, ME — a grown-ass woman — I am NOT “a cutie pie,” “cute as a button” or “cute as a bug.” It’s the damndest thing … I say that word in daily conversation to describe everything from clothes to décor to my dogs. I make it a point to tell my girlfriends how cute they look whenever I see them. But when certain people use it against me, I mentally throw elbows and scratch eyeballs.  Last week was the first one in the two years since I started my little ol’ website that I didn’t write a blog post.
It had to happen, and here’s why. It was a hectic Monday morning. I had been sick for the prior 10 days, and I was way behind on more than a few projects. I was scrambling to get organized, return some calls and tie up some loose ends that had gotten badly frayed the week before. I was a hot mess. My brain was still hazy, so coming up with a viable blog topic became a futile pursuit. The only things I could think of to say involved a litany of complaints of how shitty I felt. And lemme tell you what, feeding the self-pity monster is never good for my mental state. By about 2 p.m. on Monday afternoon, after hours of worrying over not having a single word on the page, a radical thought occurred to me: “What if — just what IF — you skip a week, Amy?” And so I did. |
About Amy HiggsA former newspaper columnist, Amy takes her random, slice-of-life stories to the web. After 12 years, she's still just saying. Archives
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