Coming Back to Life: An Essay
Ben Ashby
Do you ever feel yourself coming back to life? Does the world around you just feel more vivid and clear? Do you feel yourself enjoying the things that ones made you so passionate and filled you will fire? Do you feel yourself eager to be around people again. For me the last few months has been that. For a very very long time I have known my passions and I have known the things that bring me the greatest joy in life. I’ve known that I love small towns, rural spaces, good food, slow living, exploration, the little things in life, history, and really stimulating conversations. To Kill a Mocking Bird very much is my favorite book, Steel Magnolias is very much my favorite movie, and Martha Stewart’s pre-Snoop era will forever have a place in my heart. I just can feel it within me when I am passionate and what really makes me feel like me.
However the past few years I haven’t felt that at all. I’ve bounced between feeling nothing and life being generally grey and having some sort of out of body experience. The way I have described it is….I figuratively try to walk or to even stand but my legs don’t work and I can only crawl. Like in my mind I have all the cognitive ability to do what I know I’m good at, but tangibly I couldn’t seem to make it work. I became very lost in that. I felt very much hopeless and stuck. It is like I could plan my step A to B to C, knowing exactly what to do, but I never had the tools to take any of those steps. I naturally have a dominate personality, but during that time I just felt completely submissive. It was better to feel invisible than it was to feel embarrassed.
You know we all have failures in life, we all make mistakes, and we all have periods we’d rather not remember….the important part is to let those times strengthen you and push you forward, not to cripple you. I allowed them to not only cripple me, but to instill this incredibly powerful fear in me. My voice, my talents, my passions were all gone.
Last year I began begging the universe to put the steps into motion for me to return to myself. I began constantly asking for the universe to give me not only the strength to stand, but the ability to put pride aside to ask friends for help in teaching me how to return to my passions, and to regain my own ability to feel in control of my own life. In those moments I didn’t know the steps were particularly unfolding, but 2019 allowed me to return to many of those passions and to feel like I was being given a second chance to create and speak and feel.
It started with my love of Slow Living…you know the movement that embraces intentional living, old fashioned ways, and celebrating the little things in life. I was allowed to guest edit the Slow Living issue of Where Women Cook, a friends magazine dedicated to women in their kitchens. This simple gift from a friend reconnected me with a community that I felt like I had been kicked out of. It allowed me to relearn my passion for sharing the stories of others and for seeing rural life and kitchens and gardens in an editorial, almost poetic way. The year continued with me rediscovering my own love for my hometown by once again becoming a part of my local art guild and downtown. We ended the year with a magical American made pop up shop that brought together some of my favorite American made makers and the talents of locals in my hometown. Getting to be in the shop and work the shop made me feel like I could stand and could once again be a positive light in the community. Its funny how the little things affect us as much as they do.
For a long time I’ve felt like I didn’t have anything to add to conversations and that I really didn’t have a reason to be around people. I just had this inherent shame that I wasn’t doing much in life so why should anyone want to talk to me. Yes, I’m realizing this is coming off far more self loathing than it should. I would watch my friends build these amazing blogs and businesses, knowing full well that if they could do it, I could to, but I allowed myself to be crippled and motionless. Instead I quietly encouraged them from afar while letting my own dreams die.
Towards the end of the year I heard a quote that was something like….only do things in life that you will be proud of. I cannot tell you how hard it hit me. It was one of those Oprah moments. Like whoa. You mean I could truly only do things that I was proud of and in ways I would be proud of. Every morning I repeat that line to myself. I immediately started making changes that would put me in line with that. I used to be a total over achiever, but even in the beginning of my business I never had the tools and skills to do things in the way they needed to be done, so I just carried this mentality of “just get it done and move on”. I even got to the point where I simply wouldn’t work on it myself because I knew I didn’t even want to be associated. I became secure in failure and subconsciously sat myself up for failure because it was an emotion I knew how to feel. I no longer knew how to feel the emotions of success. Fear had consumed me. After nearly a decade in business though I forced myself to really take inventory of my personal skills and talents and the community I had around me. With that inventory I sat down and said…what do I need to cut because it isn’t up to my true quality standards, not the standards I had allowed myself to accept. Ie…would I wear the t shirts we sell….no, they’re cheap and ill fitting… would I follow our social media…no because it feels unintentional and shallow…and the list goes on to include lots of other things and things in my personal life. Even in that first moment my spark reignited.
It truly took finding the source of my shame or darkness or whatever you want to call it to be able to begin correcting my path. For me it was doing things I am proud of. From there we cut the shirts, we developed a real strategy for the website, the newsletters, and for social. Most importantly I knew that if I wanted to create something I (all caps ME) could be proud of I needed to be driving this long-haul trailer myself. Now I am retraining my brain and my daily habits to create the needed time to do things in the proper way, to go, very pride-lessly, to friends and peers to ask for help, and to know that if you want the results you really do have to put in ALL of the needed efforts.
My personal journey has also included doing things that carry positive energy and treating my mind and body the way I want them to be treated. At the end of the day you want to feel good. Foods, exercise, socialization, and where we allow ourselves to go all play a part in that. Listening to the voice that says…this is what you NEED, this is where you need to be, this is what you need to do, rather than simply appeasing others and doing what is easiest has been fundamental. If you don’t value yourself, no one else will either.
I went into 2020 knowing I wanted to set goals, not resolutions. I wanted to feel like myself and to channel my passions and talents and my community into my business. I wanted to take nearly a decades worth of lessons and fundamentally build the businesses I wanted to create when I started. I wanted to find a way I could split more time between life in New York City and my hometown in Kentucky, and how I could remember that I have agency in my own life. Every morning, after I’ve said my lines about only doing things I am proud of, I ask the universe to provide me with the tools to make those goals a reality and to put my own strengths to work in getting there. Those simple positive steps have already started a ball rolling that will hopefully allow me to achieve my goals.
So here we are in 2020 and I am taking pride in my business, closing up old business while moving ever forward, treating myself well and good and being proud of who I am and what I do, working to have the means to split my time between the city and the country, and daily rebuilding my love of community, pastoral landscapes, and story telling.
I am excited for the year, and I am finally proud of what I am creating. I hope you’ll follow along….
