Incomplete with the red pen

If you had to use one single word to describe your Body of Work, what would it be?

Mine is Incomplete. I was going to use “unfinished” but “incomplete” has more red pen, C+, even Ds and Fs in the memory bank. 

As I wrote, it felt like I was on the cusp of achieving. recognition, competence, awareness, and the truth is, I was learning, but seeing that red pen made me want to shrink. Like red was the color that painted me invisible - erased as if me and my ideas never existed at all, no…worse than never existed…weren’t worthy of existing, exiled to some outer world where the worst of the worst things go.

Thousands of images, ideas, songs, drawings, sketches, paintings, words, and stories sit on hard drives, in Google Drive, and in notebooks in my garage from the 90s. Many have been to some version of my own red pen stage. A few are finished and only a handful have seen another human.  I thought about what that would take. The answer is weird and not cute.

Finishing things would require someone to save me. Someone has always saved me. It’s been a crutch, a privilege, and a curse that I have counted on for the better part of 40+ years. Bad grade red pen work in school was corrected, not by me, but by my mother. The mother of the child who could do no wrong. That was a disservice I learned early on that I would not return to my own children, but a bit of a learning handicap nonetheless. This isn’t a blame game story-time fake trauma fault-my-mother thing - it was her love, that I know. She had power at my school and she believed she was using it to help me. We know better, we do better. She did better later.

It may or may not have been the start, but it was not the end of my dependence on being saved. I liked it. I used it. I relied on it. I found it wherever I could. I didn’t have to finish anything. What a luxury. Not college. Not cosmetology school. Not pretty much anything. No one held me accountable, least of all me. They may have tried in their own way - arguments and fights, but not very hard. I provided plenty of benefits, as the benefactor. I was happy to people-please and serve my way through any situation that I bowed out of and get right into another one. In case I sound like the villain, to be honest, I’m not sure I wasn’t anymore. I always believed I was the good girl, but I truly don’t know anymore. I found out at age 37 that I have bipolar disorder, and now that I have it under control, I have a lot - a lot of questions about who I have always been.

Is that what they call codependency? Manipulation? Is that the definition of depending on the control of another? It was the self-administered numbing medication for my own pain. 

It took a debilitating physical illness where I couldn’t give anything back for me to discover what that pain was. 

Weaning off the co-dependent medicine hasn’t happened. There are dosages I don’t even realize I take. 

But I do most of my own saving now. I leave manipulation to the chiropractor.

So why can’t I complete anything?

Because incomplete is safe.

No one else can come in and mark me up. 

No one else can tell me how I’ve plagiarized or how wrong or how boring or how ineffective and inefficient or how I’m just clout chasing or dollar chasing or whatever.

All of the worst things have already been said to me, and just like the red pen from teachers and professors decades ago, when I know they’re just wrong, I don’t fight, I freeze. 

But then, I release. And I remember that I created an entire modality for this. I completed it! And then I added it to my Body of Work, which I turned into a 1:1 year long experience to create Energetic Change which means a total rearranging of the way my clients brain, body, mind and spirit work together so they create totally different results in their life - and while life is always both complete and incomplete, in 1 year their life IS different, they have learned how to release suffering and how to manage their world. Their emotions. Their behavior. And create what they want to see in the world. 

And all of the goodness I’ve created that is actually creating massive change in the clients lives that I have helped…if it was sitting on a giant hard drive or on the paper easel and you never saw it…

Those in suffering would keep on suffering 

Bodies in pain would stay in pain

People with bipolar disorder would never learn how much control they actually have over their own mind, body and brain because of their own intuition and spirit

Photographers would stay stagnant in their business and would never learn the coaching and mentoring that I teach

Relationships would end needlessly

Businesses would never start. 

The TRUTH is 

I’m incomplete. 

My life isn’t complete

Nothing I do ever has to be complete.

There is no red pen.

I don’t move photographers to begin mentoring or coaching, you are moved and you are already who you need to be - being incomplete is part of that.

I don’t make a business better, you do, and sometimes better means incomplete.

I don’t make or break relationships, you have all the power you need inside to create what you desire to begin or end the relationship you want even if it’s incomplete right now.

Your business will start if you are willing to expand and experience being incomplete and uncomfortable and so much more.