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Hi Reader,

In my life, I’ve made some… interesting choices. Here are a few of them:

1.

In 2009, I took a year-long course with a respected business coach who was just starting to take off. She had already built a successful wellness business, and was shifting into teaching entrepreneurship. She had the chops, and has since built a 7-figure business several times over, and coached thousands of budding business owners to financial success.

I never really took her advice. It’s not that it was necessarily bad – it turns out that running a business based on actual numbers is a good skill to have — but there was something in how she taught, and more importantly, in how she lived her life, that set my teeth on edge. I didn’t want to believe that success entailed sacrificing friends, leisurely meals with loved ones, my health or taking time in the middle of the day to lay in the grass.

I didn’t have the words then to describe what I felt. I just knew it didn’t feel right. So I resisted it.

And for years, I told myself that I was wrong for it. Lazy. “Uncoachable.”

I felt ashamed that I couldn’t do it right, and that my business was just chugging along, rather than going super-sonic. Even more so, that I couldn’t bring myself to care if it went super-sonic.

I just wanted to hang out with my friends, be available to my aging parents, and help people. I couldn’t think of a reason I ought to be making that much money, and so I just… didn’t.

And for years, I felt ashamed of that. Not enough to change what I was doing. But just enough to feel guilty. Like I was doing it wrong.

Like I was doing my life wrong.

Eventually I figured out that the point of having my own business was to make it work for me and my goals. And what worked for me was emphatically not a 7-figure hustle-and-grind girlboss thing. I didn’t need to be a multi-millionaire. I didn’t even want to be a multi-millionaire.

After all, you don’t need a million bucks to lay in a hammock in the middle of the afternoon while working on your manuscript. You just need a hammock, a printout of your manuscript, and enough money to cover the bills.

What I needed was to figure out what “enough” was for me. So that’s what I did. And then I didn’t feel guilty anymore.

I felt free.

2.

Along the way, I made friends with another business owner, a copy-writer named Steph. She reached out to me and said she missed me from the course we had taken together, and asked if I wanted to be business accountabilibuddies.

I didn’t know exactly what that would entail, but she seemed cooler than me, and didn’t squirm when I talked about coaching people around sexuality and consensual non-monogamy, so I said yes.

So every week, for over 15 years now, we spend an hour freewheeling about what’s going on in our lives and businesses. Sometimes we noodle on a particular marketing conundrum or try to figure out what to do about a challenging client, but far more often, we talk about how our lives are matching up with our dreams from when we were younger, or the futures we are dreaming for ourselves.

We return to certain topics over and over again, including books, politics and (on a surprisingly frequent basis) death.

One day, we noticed that it wasn’t so much about what our lives looked like, but rather that no matter what we did, it was important to us that we made interesting choices.

👉 Interesting to the people we are today.

👉 Interesting to our younger selves.

👉 And interesting to our future selves we are living into becoming.

Because that’s who we were ultimately accountable to. While our friendship started as being accountable in our businesses, it became a years-long conversation about what really matters to us, no matter what it looks like or whether it makes sense to other people.

There is something powerful about having a connection with someone who celebrates you and your interesting choices. Because lord knows, we’ve both made some that simply do not make sense to outsiders. But they decidedly do make sense when we remember who we are actually accountable to.

Finding someone else who could help me remember who I am when I get lost in the weeds of shoulds, supposed-to’s and “how everyone else does it” — even though I didn’t know that’s what I was doing — continues to be one of the best choices I’ve ever made.

Thanks Steph.

3.

Steph and I once made a pinky-swear that if our businesses ever took more out of us than they were giving us, we would give it all up and go live in a van down by the river.

When my mom died in 2019, after four months in the hospital, it was hard. When my dad died, completely unexpectedly, in the fall 2021, it absolutely flattened me.

Like many others, I had spent much of the Deep Pandemic leaning into escape fantasies, aggressively researching tiny houses, real estate in other cities, and camper vans. In my life, I was functioning, but barely.

After my dad died, it became crystal clear that I had no choice but to take a capital-B BREAK. I knew my book was coming out in January 2022, and that I wanted to do a book tour. But with COVID still raging and my heart broken into a thousand pieces, I knew I couldn’t support clients or work in the ways I had been before, without taking some drastic steps.

So I did what any rational person would do: I ran away to New Orleans.

I took a hard look at what I was needing (time to grieve, a place that could hold my grief, a sadness-and-adventure buddy, a reliable internet connection, etc) and allowed myself to daydream something that seemed impossible. I knew I couldn’t afford to take the entire time off, so I asked myself what would happen if I only worked half-time.

I hit up an old housemate of mine who was also grieving the death of a loved one and working remotely, and I asked her if she wanted to spend a month in NOLA with me. She immediately said yes.

Then I spent a couple of weeks turning my tiny Honda Fit into a micro-camper with the help of my many, many Pinterest pins, put my stuff in storage, and hit the road for the beginning of what would become a 12,000 mile road trip.

On the way to New Orleans, I drove some of the same roads I knew my parents had traveled, some 45 years prior, before I was born. I camped on public land, spent an entire day writing down memories in the white sand dunes in New Mexico, and visited a Texas cousin who has shown up for my family in some of our darkest times.

When we got to New Orleans, my friend and I rented a shoebox-sized stand-alone studio with two beds in it, survived a nearby tornado on our first night there, and spent a month working, journaling, exploring, crying and listening to live music.

It wasn’t the same as quitting to live in a van by the river, but that little nugget of permission gave me the courage to consider what I really needed in a challenging time in my life, when neither quitting entirely nor getting a fancy Sprinter van was an option for me.

I leaned into the trust that my needs (for space, for grief, for time, for novelty, for being held, for a different climate, for solidarity, for mystery, for movement, for all this and more…) were valid, despite their enormity. And I was willing to strip away everything that wasn’t necessary while giving the necessary my fullest attention to make this happen.

And somehow, I got what I needed.

Over the years, I’ve learned to listen to those recurring fantasies, knowing they contain gems even if their fulfillment looks different in reality than in our imaginings. It never was about a van, or a river, or any particular lifestyle, but rather the permission to always consider the truth of my needs, and to be creative in meeting them.

Even if that meant holing up with a laptop and a friend in a tiny cottage, in a magical sweaty city, 2000 miles from home.

4.

Eventually, I had to come back to San Francisco. For many reasons, not the least of which include that I have roots here, I love my community and much of my work is here.

After four months on the road, including New Orleans and a book tour up the entire west coast, I needed a place to live.

I was in my mid-40s and considering living in a housing co-op of seven people.

Now it’s not uncommon in the overpriced shitshow of a housing market that is the Bay Area for full-grown people – even married couples — to have housemates. After all, the income of 5 or 6 grown adults can rent a pretty swanky mansion up in the East Bay hills, which is an effective way of staving off the existential dread that comes with making well over six figures and still not being able to afford owning a home. Which is the case for many people here.

But me? Living in a co-op?

This is where the cultural programming of my entire life kicked in: “What do you mean live in a group house? You should own your own house by now. Why do you always pick such expensive places to live? You could move to Florida and afford a house there. You shouldn’t have to depend on other people like that. You and C should be getting your own place together; that’s what a real relationship is. What if there’s a bunch of house drama? What if you don’t like the housemates? Isn’t this kind of thing for college students?”

But here’s the thing, Reader… I LOVED IT.

Some other time I may go into all the gifts that living in an inter-generational household of seven engaging, proactive adults brought me, from never having to do my least favorite chores, to always having someone around to cuddle or help solve a problem, but for now I’ll just say that it worked out really well for me.

And I’m so glad that I resisted the urge I’ve had for so long to buy my own place or live with only my partner. Because now I can see that that urge wasn’t based on my desires.

It was based on my fear.

And fear is a terrible thing to base real estate decisions on.

I have made a lot of unconventional choices in my life. Some out of necessity, some as a way of creatively solving problems, some just because I felt like it. That being said…

Your life should not look like my life.

Nothing in what I’m saying here is about you modeling what you do with your life on mine. It would be weird if you did.

But. BUT!

The underlying principles at play?

• A foundation of unshakable self-trust…
• Determining what “enough” looks like for you…
• The wisdom to listen to your inner felt-sense when something seems off…
• Noticing when your cultural programming is taking the wheel, and gently redirecting yourself to what you actually want…
• Discerning whether fear or desire is driving your decisions…
• Being accountable to your future, past and current self…
• A willingness to tend to your needs, even when the “how” seems incomprehensible…
• Building friendships with people who are willing to get vulnerable with you and able to reflect you back to yourself…

…These are things I want for you.

And, not coincidentally, these are the skills we develop in the Good Girl Recovery Program.

Over 12 months, with practices, coaching and community support, you’ll come to find these things within yourself.

What you do with that will be entirely and uniquely yours.

Til next time,
xx,MarciaB.

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PS - Curious about the Good Girl Recovery Program but not sure if it’s for you? Let’s chat! Schedule a call with me here.​

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