Be a beginner over and over again

Back in December, I felt the familiar itch. I’ve come to know myself and my creative process over the years, and usually a few times a year, around my birthday and the dawn of a new year, I yearn for the woods. 

I do my best thinking alone, out of my element, away from anything familiar. Beyond the distractions and noises and demands of my normal existence. So I packed up my car and my dog and headed for rural Mississippi. 

Among the pines, building fires and hiking the water-logged, muddy trails with my dog close at my heel, I felt laser-focused on the year ahead. I let myself ideate, I let myself stew. With giant-sized post-its covering the walls of my small cabin, I felt like a mad scientist scheming in my laboratory, or maybe more like that Charlie Day conspiracy meme. 

The truth is, 2024 had not gone to plan at all. After six months of full-time travel in 2023, the idea was to temporarily touch down in Baton Rouge, where I’m from, pay the reasonable note at my mother-in-law’s empty rental unit, and figure out the next move. I wanted to continue traveling in 2024, using the condo as a home base, enjoying the freedoms afforded by cheap rent and saving every extra dollar to put toward my wedding. At the time this decision was made, I had a full-time, seemingly stable remote job paying me a good salary.

I had drastically tapered down my own client work while in this role. I stopped marketing myself, and I closed my business banking accounts, expecting to be in this role for years to come. 

The plot twist came a month after we touched down in Baton Rouge. I was told that there was no longer the budget for my role, and was offered a contract renewal and an updated, significantly reduced role valued at around half of what I had been earning. With no clients of my own, and with none of the infrastructure I typically have in place to market myself and my work, I felt I had no choice but to accept. I signed on the dotted line, humiliated.

Fortunately I had some savings to supplement my new reduced salary, and I immediately went to work emailing old clients trying to drum up business while continuing in my demoted role. To say I was financially strapped, disheartened and depressed is an understatement. I turned to tarot, to astrology, to reiki. The self-care tools in my toolkit weren’t hitting like they used to.

Stuck in my hometown, my travel dreams on pause and my income dwindling, I felt undervalued, overwhelmed and, frankly, stupid for hitching my wagon to someone else’s business and abandoning my own.

Somehow 10 months passed this way, in what I came to call my “self-imposed flop era.” This was weighing on me as I booked my Mississippi sabbatical. My attempts to redefine, rebuild and restructure my offerings during those months had started to feel like I was just licking my wounds. I was spending a lot of time and energy on strategies that weren’t helping me reach those I want to reach and connect to the projects I want to work on.

It was during one of my cabin brainstorm sessions that the word came to me, like a feather floating down from heaven, like a channeled message directly from the Universe. 

Beginnership.

I first encountered this term in 2021, when I was working my way through the Ren Ed. program’s modules. Ren Ed. was a social media client of mine, and I wanted to understand their courses intimately before I began any copywriting on the project.

One of founder Sophie Campise’s modules discusses competency, assessing how much knowledge you possess in any given area of your life. We may be at different levels of competency across different areas of our life, ranging from beginner to master. We need certain levels of competency to be effective and thrive.

Based on the notes I took back then, here’s what she has to say about what she terms “beginnership”:

“We are always in beginnership. If we are up to big things, we will be in beginnership all the time. A way to experience a fulfilled life is having the willingness to become a beginner over and over again.”

The willingness to become a beginner over and over again.

A decade into my career, with several big, dream clients and projects under my belt, with a solid professional reputation, at the ripe age of 32, I recognize landing on “beginnership” as the word to take me into 2025 is…a choice. But here’s how I see it.

What used to work and function for me, the way I used to structure my life, my days, my offerings, the way I show up professionally and personally, could use a refresh. A little zhuzh. A fresh coat of paint.

For me, right now, I feel a strong pull to go back to the drawing board of my life and take stock honestly (something I focus on a lot with my clients). I need to look at myself with fresh eyes and see all of the possibilities available to me. Using all I’ve learned in the last decade, in the last 32 years, to break up with old patterns, reassess what I value and utterly overhaul my life and, of course, my internet presence. 

In some ways, it’s a homecoming. I’m inviting myself to come home to myself. In other ways, it’s a becoming. An invitation to create a new reality for myself that better supports me, my work, my creativity.

Opening myself up to beginnership, embracing that concept, feels incredibly vulnerable. Beginnership entails lots of trial and error, growing pains, getting it wrong and starting from scratch. It can look like having a vision that is incredibly grand and not yet having the skills to execute to my desired level. It will mean staring my own perfectionism dead in the eye and daring myself to move past it. It’s going to require me to ask for help, from family and friends and my supportive network of guides and healers. It’s going to humble me, and Leos (me) don’t do “humble” very gracefully. 

If you made it this far, I hope you’ll join me on this journey and meet me with patience as I build whatever this *gestures broadly* is to become. I think it’s going to be really good.

<3

A beginner