You Are Not Your Business

This is a call to arms. A clarion call to rebellion. An invitation to burn the status quo to the ground.

Are you with me? Let’s go.

Nearly every day this week in my work with clients at Slow Folk or in my conversations here on Substack, I have met a woman fraught by the idea of creating and maintaining a personal brand.

I have watched and listened as this inane idea laid their bright and shiny dreams to waste. So much so, that my Mama Bear energy has risen, unbidden.

She. Is. Pissed.

So I’m gonna say it often, and I’m gonna say it loud : *Climbs onto soapbox to holler into the crowd* – YOU ARE NOT FOR SALE.

You are not your business. You are not a brand.

You do not exist, miraculously alive on this rock hurtling through space with the rare spark of consciousness and creativity and the ability to create life itself – merely to be consumed by strangers.

You are a human being.

Glorious in your contradiction, vast in the immensity of your inner spaces, home to multitudes, your internal expanses echoing the infinite universe beyond this atmospheric skin.

We are each of us, soil and stardust. The improbability of each one of us being here, in this moment, in these fleshy bodies, sharing this thought together – it is so huge as to be unnamable.

How on earth could that magic be reduced to a ‘brand’?