Founded & Founding
Should I start a business?
Another friend announced her consulting practice via Instagram last week. I’ve come to expect an announcement or three every other week; the Bureau of Labor Statistics announced that 1.7 million people had been unemployed for 27+ weeks as of April. The natural next step of the current administration’s unofficial mantra of FAFO is the necessary, if uneventful, WAWO (wait around, work occasionally).
In the ungodly amount of time I spend on LinkedIn every week, I am both heartened and heartsick at the barrage of posts announcing some enterprising person’s new consulting venture “after years of commitment to community, I’m taking the leap” etcetera etcetera. It makes me feel haunted and restless: a confusing coexistence for LinkedIn, the place where dreams go to die.
Still, it’s made me think. I’ve consulted on and off for seven years, and have never really made it official. A website felt like a commitment I couldn’t make, and an announcement of my services on the aforementioned LinkedIn felt like an admission of defeat. Consulting has always felt like a side gig, a supplemental offering that I can make out of the space I want to give to projects that inspire me. I’ve never really credited myself with the energy it takes to be a founder - I work with them constantly, and I have an incredible amount of respect for what it takes.
Most of my clients have been ambitious, dreamer women who have the grit and naivéte to start something in a world obsessed with endings. I enjoy working with them because I am inspired by the infallibility of vision that is required to begin something. Organizations are complex configurations of human beings doing repetitive and satisfying machinations - sometimes easy to diagnose and sometimes inexorably toxic. I understand this bureaucracy and it’s approachable to me in a way that vision has never been. Per my last post, vision and its sister Joy feel- to me - like a roller coaster ride. & I hate roller coasters.
I've found that most founders are exhausted by the repetition and minutiae required to run and maintain a business - not because they can’t do it, but because their purpose has always been bigger than that. This is where I often step in, comfortable in my ability to translate a dream into a cellular apparatus and make it digestible. I do that all the time, for myself.
Last week my former coach Victoria asked me, with her telltale half-grin, whether this was the time for me to found something of my own. My friend Mel, over shoyu ramen and gossip, told me she could see me doing amazing things as a consultant here in Newport. It is tempting to think of myself as the go-getter that can build and orchestrate a future that is fulfilled by vision first. And it’s not that I don’t think I can do it.
It’s more so that I believe - truly - that my strength is in weaving things that already exist into new sequences. I want to be a finisher more than a starter. I think that’s why I’m always caught off guard by the end of a role or relationship. Every time I start a new job, for better or for worse, I envision myself in thirty years, in this place, belonging. Far too much to place on a capitalistic exercise, but a girl can dream.
To return to consulting - I’m considering it, of course. I find a lot of joy in helping people find solutions and I value my time. It’s really just that the prospect of finding business overwhelms me.
In fact, I think that the deepest irony of founding is that we’ve chosen the word “find” to describe it. We rarely say that someone "began a project" or celebrate an industry’s best “starters”. Instead, we revere the people who commit themselves to an endless searching, christening them ‘founders’: people who have found their business, their purpose, or their resources. It’s a noble cause and a terrifying one, and I respect any person that decides to make a life as a seeker.
I’m not sure if that’s who I am, but I know what it is to find oneself in a set of tasks or to begin something as a response to the intangible. To begin is to find, and I find that comforting- especially as I keep searching.
work|flow
a segment on what i’m learning in my search for work and the work to search
This week, I’m trying something different. I’ve interviewed my dear friend Hal Trejo and we’re talking about what it takes to found an organization, and what we’ve learned from working together.
Hal was my assistant at the Curve Foundation, while also serving as the Founding Executive Director of All Rainbow and Allied Youth (ARAY) in Florida. Since we’ve both left Curve, I’ve worked as a strategic consultant for Hal and lead ARAY’s board retreat earlier this Spring.
I love working with them because they teach me a lot about actual accountability, and we’ve been able to lead and learn from each other in so many configurations. As I continue on my side quest to become a podcaster, I couldn’t think of a better person to start a conversation with.
something beautiful
something beautiful i found
I don’t know that Aaron Davis (instagram: @aarondavistattoos) would call himself the founder of a new movement for Afro-Americana tattooing, but I think I would. Like most founders, his vision has been undermined (see season 15 of Ink Master), but that might be par for the course (see Jackson Pollock, 1948).
I am obsessed with what he has done to translate the traditionalism of American Traditional tattooing (bold and clean lines, limited color schemes and classic imagery). It’s on my bucket list to sit for him, and I want the world to know about what he’s doing for tattooing.
words to live by
Found Prose
On Monday I finished Aria Aber’s debut novel, Good Girl. This newsletter has her to thank - the way that she writes moved me to try to put words to the indecipherable and to let texture leak out onto the page. Her work is visceral, haunted, effervescent, and brisk.
I moved through this novel quickly and lost myself to the summer of 2019 when I went to Berlin and fell through the looking glass. Add this book to your summer reading list, or spend some time with this beautiful short story that she wrote.
Found Poetry
I discovered the practice of found poetry earlier this year at a workshop hosted by my beloved Lit Arts RI. I wrote this blackout poem then.
SAGITTARIUS
catch yourself
replace worry with faith
here will also help the heart
fast-moving
in your past
a more experimental tendency to gravitate to
favour and work.
written in stone.
you. do not.
work for others you might
not work.
The joy is not there
Perhaps it is you
perhaps it is
You be careful Don’t stay in it.
conquer.
There is more.