turns out I’m just luteal
It’s that time again. When blowing up my online business and creative projects feels just a tad tempting.
That makes it sound like some sort of identity crisis or mental breakdown, but really it’s not. I’m just luteal.
It was only a year or two ago that I learned what a “luteal phase” even IS. Seriously, that’s how out of tune with my own body I was. Or maybe I just didn’t really experience the different phases of my cycle as intensely as I do the older I get.
All I know is that roughly once each month nowadays, I want to go all Ctrl + A + DELETE on my online business and everything I’ve created on the internet.
I’m not actually going to. I know this feeling will pass, because it always does, and next week I’ll probably be feeling super excited and giddy over something I want to do or create.
For now though, indulge me in a lil vent sesh, will you, reader?
When I get this way, without fail, I can’t help but contemplate (incessantly) the… intangibility of it all?
The business and body of work I’ve built lives inside a screen. And it only exists because I’m fortunate enough to live in a time and place where I have access to the World Wide Web.
I don’t have a storefront.
I don’t shake hands with customers or even SPEAK to them unless it’s on a Zoom call.
I don’t have actual products someone can hold in their hands.
What I do have is services and “offers” that I made up inside my own head and convinced others on the internet they should buy because I said so. Isn’t that kind of what all of us “online business” people are doing?
It’s funny because sometimes I think it’s such a cool concept — that we have the ability to essentially “create” money out of nothing. Yet, other times, I sit here scratching my head wondering, money and survival aside, “what’s the POINT?”
Online business in a nutshell:
Providing services to other online business owners so they can sell their services to business owners that help other business owners that…
See what I mean?
(I know many online business owners serve other clientele, but I think a LOT of us are service providers serving service providers.)
Yesterday I drafted a Substack article I intended to publish this morning. It was about content platforms and my own online content ecosystem, and a kind of litmus test for deciding when it makes sense to “expand.”
Then I kind of thought to myself: “Literally allll of this shit is made up.”
The concept of content and platforms and all these “best practices” for everything.
Sometimes I just imagine trying to explain Substack and email lists and marketing and online business to my (dead) mamaw.
She’d probably think I have a screw loose, or twenty.
How can I have SO much going on, so much bouncing around my brain, yet when I close the laptop it’s like it just goes *POOF*???
TL;DR: The internet is weird. Online business is weird. And maybe I need to write an actual book that I can publish and hold in my hands and put in my family’s hands as if to say, “Hey, I actually DO stuff!”
But for now, I’ll just hit publish on this Substack post inside Internetland.
-Charlee 🐿️
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