On not being afraid of the dark

hello to my favorite yet recently neglected corner of the internet! Full disclosure, this is a complete brain dump brought to you by reflecting on a milestone with the clarity that comes from going on a walk without the distraction of extreme heat (it’s breezy and 79 this AM in Charleston!!) but I hope it lands none the less

Bringing a new idea to life feels a lot more like searching around in a dark room, grasping at what seems like the thing you’re looking for, than flipping on a light and seeing it clearly.

If you’ve ever fumbled for a pacifier at 3 a.m., you know what I mean. You’re confident you’re in the right room. You felt called to it. But nothing is obvious yet. You reach for something and think, this must be it. But it’s not.

That doesn’t mean you’re lost. It just means you’re closer.

Todays letter isn’t about clarity. It’s about not being afraid of the dark. About staying still long enough for something to take shape.

Today is my son’s fifth birthday. That feels like the right place to begin :)

Motherhood

Five years ago, I took the ultimate walk into the dark.

My daughter’s birth 8 years ago was a a huge growth catalyst. I had severe postpartum depression. It forced me to see how many things in my life I was managing instead of actually living. It set off a chain reaction—new home base, new career, new people. The kind of change that doesn’t look like change at first. But looking back, it was everything.

When I found out I was pregnant with my son in 2019 I was terrified. Could I survive being turned upside down again? Would the tools I learned stand up in the storm? As COVID and its protocols kept progressing and evolving so did my anxiety about viewing myself delivering in a hospital in a mask. At 37 weeks I made the decision to course correct and try it a different way that I had done it with my daughter and deliver naturally in a birth center.

It’s still one of the best decisions I’ve ever made for myself.

There is nothing more “dark room” than labor. You can’t effort your way through it. You surrender. You wait. You ride it out. You break. And eventually, the lights turn on. And when it’s done, you’re not one person anymore. You’re two. And you’re more powerful than before.

But you don’t get there by solving. You get there by letting go.

Business

The same thing is true in business.

The past eight years, especially the past five, have been a series of pivots. Each one getting closer. Consulting was my first grab. I loved it. I love helping people who are ready to step into a different kind of work. I love being around people with vision. But consulting isn’t scalable. I care too much. I’d lose sleep thinking about client ideas. I’d over-invest, not because anyone asked me to—but because I couldn’t help it.

So I tried freelance. Cleaner lines, more structure. I worked on automations, internal systems, backend cleanups, small team comms. I liked it. But again, not quite it. Walking into someone’s world and saying, I’ll be whatever you need, eventually wears thin. Even if I’m okay being misunderstood, I do believe there’s value in being able to say, here’s what I do, here’s how I help, and here’s what it looks like to work together.

That brought me to Inventor-Ease.

I’ve been sketching it since early 2023. The core idea was simple. Why don’t independent retailers have access to the same backend intelligence bigger brands do? Why is so much of their data still invisible? Why do they only find out what’s wrong after it’s already too late?

Retailers don’t need dashboards. They need to know what’s coming in, what’s running late, where the gaps are. They need clean handoff. They need clarity before chaos. So we built it. We cleaned vendor files. We created purchase order systems. We built checks and balances. We linked tools that don’t want to talk to each other. Shopify is the closest thing most retailers have to a smart system. but that is essentially like saying you have the internet. You still have to make it work for you. It’s not turn key.

It’s been hard. And it’s working.

The light’s not fully on. But we can see the outline of the room now. We know where we are and can see what this is becoming.

I still freelance a little. Some of the off-menu work keeps me sharp. But Inventor-Ease is where the long arc leads. Because the problem is real. And the relief is needed. And the solution deserves a team.

We haven’t gone viral. We haven’t found all our people yet. That’s okay. Knowing we are in the right room is fuel enough to keep going.

Stillness

I think what gets missed in a high-speed culture is the value of stillness. We value dopamine vs oxytocin (more on this next week)

If something doesn’t go big on its first take, we assume it’s wrong. If the first version doesn’t sell, we think we missed the mark. But if you were dropped at the top of a mountain without climbing, your body would collapse from the altitude.

The climb matters. The missteps matter. The wrong grabs are part of the right direction.

Right now, a lot of people are in a dense reality. The old tools don’t work. The old models don’t land. But that doesn’t mean the answers aren’t coming. It just means we need new builders. New listeners. New people willing to stay in the dark a little longer. If you’re out there too, feeling called to a room you can’t see the contents of yet just know:

You’re not wrong. You’re not late. And I guarantee you are closer than you were :)

Much love!

Victoria

August 2020