Tabitha Goes Pacific Northwest: How I Went From Terrified to a Whole New Era, Part 3

Sometimes when big changes are happening, the universe looks at your life and says you know what would be fun right now and shakes the whole thing like a snow globe.

My house grows more full of boxes by the day. Almost every other day a new item with a handwritten free sign goes up in the yard for whatever lucky passerby happens to drive by. To the person who took the Halo helmet, I hope you wear it with every ounce of irony I did.

Now let me walk you through a hellish week because it deserves to be documented.

It started with work. A client I was in the middle of transitioning from project to retainer threw an alarming number of red flags at once. Which put me in the ever fun position of navigating a full on “oh hell no” disengagement when one foot was still in continued work negotiations and in a project that had just closed out. I handled it the way my professors who had to sit through my epically boring HR essays would have been proud of. Polite. Boundaried. Respectful. Completely emotionally lobotomized.

Then almost immediately I had a discovery call with someone in the same very niche industry who behaved in nearly the same way. Complete with weaponized spiritual language, which if you have not listened to Organic Free Range Human Thoughts, the podcast I co-host, is something I talk about frequently because every niche does it. Considering this was not even my first rodeo of the week, this one was easier to nip in the bud and pass on entirely.

There would have been a time in my life where I said yes to both. They wanted my services, I had the opportunity to provide them, the capitalistic energetic interchange of money for time and away we would go, alignment and red flags be damned. And I would have watched the scope creep swallow me whole, with anger at myself building daily for why the hell did I do this to myself when the red flags were so glaring.

But the boundaries of who I want to work with are getting clearer by the day. And staring down my last handful of days in Texas makes those boundaries get crystal clear fast.

Because here is what my plate actually looks like right now. Single mom. Empty nester. Solo business owner. Podcast host and co-host. A business pivot in progress. A cross country move in 42 days. A dog who absolutely does not care about any of that and needs to go outside right now. And I am writing this from my new desk which is a card table after my actual desk, dining room table, and outdoor swing also did not make the final furniture cut.

On top of all of that I am actively building client websites, running backends, managing social media accounts, ghostwriting, building strategic roadmaps, and providing launch support.

So no. A client who is going to stretch my boundaries until there are no boundaries left does not get a yes. Moving while being an entrepreneur is self development on steroids and I do not have the time or the desire to work with people who will not help themselves, who do not treat people with respect, or who do not just test boundaries but attempt to tear them down entirely.

Maybe that was the universe running a little test on me. Seeing if I was all talk and no game…

But testing me twice in one week? Dick move universe. Dick move.

Then came the moving logistics.

Part of my strategic roadmap for myself, because I am a business strategy girlie through and through, included confirming furniture delivery. Specifically the part where my furniture would arrive when I did. This was a huge factor in selecting the company I went with and in choosing my arrival date. Because the vision was an epic road trip ending with curling up in my bed after a bubble bath, in fresh sheets, in my new room, in my new house, in a brand new city. The whole fresh start picture perfect moment.

Except it turns out my furniture will be taking its sweet time getting to Oregon and will not be there upon my arrival as I was promised when I booked. Nothing says fresh start like sitting on the floor, which is probably more aligned with what a cross country move actually looks like anyway.

After that news is when things started breaking.

Literally.

Within 12 hours my adorable fish shaped planter, the one that had survived four rounds of condensing my plant babies down to the select few making the journey, got knocked off by the wind and smashed on the ground. I had barely finished picking up the pieces when I went to make my first cup of coffee and dropped my favorite llama mug. The one I had specifically set aside to travel in the car so I could have coffee without unpacking a single box. I put it on the counter, missed the counter entirely because I was running on approximately no sleep, and watched it shatter.

Rest in peace llama mug. You were taken too soon.

Next came the couch.

Our big leather couch did not make the cut of furniture coming to Oregon so we said goodbye and I am genuinely proud of two things. One, I helped move it with my very enthusiastic noodle arms. Two, I remembered my gym has a sauna, which I discovered approximately three minutes after waving the couch off to its next life when my back made its feelings very loudly known. I went to get icy hot and found I had already decluttered it because I so rarely have physical altercations with furniture. Lesson learned. Bonus points, I also remembered to cancel my gym membership after this.

During the pizza party we immediately threw ourselves after the couch saga, the next twist arrived via email. A project I had been deep in the trenches of was switching directions and there would be a meeting soon to discuss it.

I sat down in the armchair I never use in my bedroom and just sat there.

I am not a crier. I hate crying with a passion because of the headache and the red face situation that follows and the general misery of the whole experience.

But I sat in that chair muttering what the fuck to no one in particular, thinking about all the work that had gone into that project, all the elbow grease, and now potentially starting fresh. It felt a little like washing the dog and watching them immediately go roll in the dirt.

There is a saying, death by a thousand cuts.

What I was experiencing was more like death by a thousand inconveniences.

No single thing was catastrophic. All of them together were starting to feel very heavy.

Seriously, universe hook your girl up with a break!

After a long conversation with myself I decided there was not a single thing I could do about any of it that evening. 

What I could do was take a long bath, watch Sam Heughan ride a motorcycle in The Couple Next Door, which has an actual plot but let us be honest that is the plot, and put my favorite high thread count sheets on my bed. One of the things you graduate into appreciating as an adult is clean sheets after getting clean yourself. It is a simple pleasure and I had earned it.

I got to the last corner of the fitted sheet, gave it that final tug, and heard a small pop.

After many glorious years of faithful service my beloved flat sheet had joined the fish planter and the llama mug in whatever heaven is reserved for favorite things that did not survive the journey.

You know what I did?

I laughed.

Not a polite little chuckle. A full five minutes of completely unhinged hysterical laughter that brought my kid and both dogs into the room to find me still holding the sheet, unable to explain myself.

And then I went to sleep. Because sometimes that is genuinely all you can do.

Here is what I want to say about all of this.

I am so tired of the pretty perfect picture people paint of their lives and businesses. The perfectly curated share of how easy and aligned and flowing everything is. And yes, I know, I have talked about things aligning when Portland locked into place. I meant that. That full body yes was real.

But aligned does not mean easy. Aligned does not mean a Fortune 500 company appeared overnight or that Sam Heughan showed up at my door fully committed to pretending to be Jamie Fraser for my personal pleasure. Aligned means it is right. It does not mean it is not also hard and messy and occasionally involving a dead flat sheet at midnight.

Part of why I am documenting this journey is to show the messy parts alongside the exciting ones. The personal growth. The joy. The fear. The momentary lapses in sanity. The bumps in the road. Because everything in this little adventure we call life can exist at once and frequently it does. 

That is not always pretty. And pretending it is does everyone a disservice.

This is me. 42 days out. Counting down and so ready (and that isn’t just now because the water now smells like an indoor pool, wth Texas?).

So what about you?

Are you in the death by a thousand inconveniences part of your journey right now? The unhinged laughter part? Or are you already on the other side telling the story and laughing at how ridiculous it all was?

Because all three are valid. And all three are part of it. And all three I want to hear.