$4.99
I woke up Sunday morning feeling groggy and a little sore from all the dancing and laughing, but really full of joy for the couple I spent the weekend celebrating (#offishallydiva). No matter how many weddings I go to, there's always that moment when they are about to say "I do" that gives me the chills. A few words exchanged in a few moments, and two people's lives are forever changed. And there we are, a privileged few, sitting, watching, fidgeting, casually witnessing a moment in which two souls become one.
INSERT ***CHILLS***
So I woke up feeling a lot of love and joy, and ready to carry that into the love and joy of my life, Sukoon of course. We were hosting our first official yoga event with Amina Sanders. Two Muslim hijabi women building wellness communities and safe spaces for other women to explore fitness and holistic health? HELL YES. The studio space was BEAUTIFUL. Light poured in as our yogis set out their mats, and Amina's cheerful smile just set the VIBE, a vibe I tried to capture in Sukoon's Insta-Story when...MY PHONE CRASHED.
A few hours later, I found myself wandering through the Whole Foods on Houston Street, exhausted and hating myself for not backing up my phone as religiously as I apply Retin-A at night. The only fix was to reset it completely, wiping all my data. I cringed at the hours of work going unsaved, and treated myself to a few stems of flowers and brownie bites, pretty much a steal at $2.99. At checkout, I removed my credit card as the cashier handed me my receipt, and I noticed that the brownie bites were charged at $4.99.
I started crying. YES. CRYING. The poor cashier! She was like uhm...we can fix this! Just go to the next register and they'll price adjust....it didn't matter. In that moment, seeing that $4.99 on my receipt turned into a mind storm of loneliness and open items, pending invoices, unanswered emails, bad dates, imperfect prototypes, website glitches, piled up laundry, Kit upload errors, a mountain of paperwork on my dresser...I felt like a failure.
^^^I KNOW. All the drama. But being an entrepreneur is really hard. That sounds overly reductive but it's a simple truth I'm learning and living every day. Each moment forward feels heavy on a route that could lead to success or failure. Mediocrity becomes less and less of an option, if it ever was one.
It's easy to forget that not all moments are created equal.Sometimes you just need to cry it out in a Whole Foods, and that doesn't have to be the moment that defines you. You get a refund, hope you don't run into anyone you know, wander back home, and google iPhone boot loop fixes for the next 6 hours.
Your hard-earned brownie bites are your team, your supporters, your vices and your allies. And then you fix the unfixable! You recover the unrecoverable! The mind storm settles as you scroll through your camera roll and relive the chills of two souls becoming one. And you remember that sometimes, you get to choose the moments that define you as much as you get to choose the moments that don't. You get to choose the moments that matter, and everything else is just...noise.
