*This is an extraction/addition of an email originally sent in April 2023.*
In late 2021 when I was just a few months shy of turning 30, I embarked on a journey of tapering off an SSRI I felt was keeping my life (and my "self") underwater.
That realization led me on the path of so much questioning, disenchantment, research, and "waking up" in a way that so much profound change happened, quickly, within that following year. Catapulting change. I’m not really sure what quantum leaping is, but I think it’s that.
I share this because, it's not a secret, and it's a very particular part of my story that lead me to create Guest House.
Guest House was born in early 2022 when one afternoon alone at the beach I remembered this poem and the poet who gave me comfort and solace many years before when I tapered a different SSRI for the first time.
I recited part of the poem from memory that day and knew I was meant to engage with and bring forth something important to me: my business, Guest House (The Guest House Earth LLC!).
In a way, Guest House birthed me that day.
Guest House began as a podcast as I wanted to experiment with the medium and talk about my experience with SSRIs. Simultaneously, I was creating simple skincare formulations in my spare time outside of my 9-5 publishing job and found it to be a creative outlet with endless possibilities and potential.
When I started Guest House `the skincare line` I think I so badly wanted to feel like I was doing something.
I wanted to feel successful at something and live a life out from under the thumb of a boss and other people’s companies where the nature of that kind of work had begun to be debilitating… especially around my Saturn Return. (The magic of learning my Human Design also helped me immensely.)
This is such a pervasive feeling in our culture… the feeling of needing/wanting to do something, to keep up. I see it in every type of “work” that women do, motherhood included.
I’ve recently been learning about belonging from one of my teachers.
And how feeling like we don’t belong leads us to do things out of wounding and doing-to-get looping.
When I started formulating I realized I was pretty good at it. And it felt so good that others also saw my work and wanted my creations. It was a high and I was riding it. In most other artistic pursuits, and even in friendships as I got older, I struggled to feel like I belonged in any niche or group, or that anyone really saw me.
I see now that the desire to belong was always a desire to belong to myself. A desire to belong to God, to my family, to my divine place among the whole.
It’s cellularly deep, belonging. It starts when we take our first breath.
And when I say “belonging to myself” I mean, quite simply, a pure and grounded sense of love and belonging that permeates all of creation, within us, from our Creator.
It’s unbreakable, unshakeable, divine, and all-encompassing. I learned a watered-down version of this in church growing up, but some of the biggest triggers of remembrance of my belonging have been trees and birds, somatic healing, learning about my ancestors and my bloodlines, Nils Frahm, nervous system regulation, cultivating a deep and trusting relationship with my spouse, expressing anger as an animal would in a safe container, talking to my language students from all over the world, poetry.
Creating a skincare brand that people liked and wanted was a gateway to showing me the lessons I needed to learn in belonging. It also showed me that the timeline I was on was already dead and expired. This is not uncommon.
By the time I started selling, I was already operating on a dead-end road.
It didn’t seem that way on the exterior, but the lessons that kept coming forth showed me that. But I needed to keep going… There were more lessons where the sidewalk ended. And it was all for a purpose.
Another initiation into belonging brought forth by Guest House was the truth that I’d known since my early teens yet struggled to accept the medicine it was wanting to give me.
In spaces and niches that solely involve women, a sort of “sisterhood,” there’s always at least one woman who is deeply triggered by me.
Oftentimes, she doesn’t yet understand how to work with that trigger in her own space and within her own energy, so she begins to play energy games with me, attempts to punish, dominate, or exile me, and has other women exclude or shun me.
When this happened in the skincare space, all of the unbelonging I’d ever felt started to creep in. My hackles were raised, my teeth were bared and ready to bite. All of the rage from centuries of women feeling this way was ready to attack and defend.
I am aware that my energy is deeply triggering to some.
But I also have cultivated an awareness of these dynamics with women and how to navigate them within myself (though I am far from perfect). But even with awareness and the ability to stay present in my body, it had become so tiring.
In the face of my brand being bashed by a woman/mother with tens of thousands of followers, to other brands who I considered friends continue to allow her bullying to persist for their own distorted financial gain and popularity, something clicked for me and shone as bright as daylight.
“I am no longer available for this distortion.”
I looked it in the face, acknowledged it and why it was happening, and it was done.
I was wanting to belong to a niche, to a group, to other women, to a business, to a following, to friends when none of those women were present with or aware of belonging in themselves. And I wasn’t either.
Having a business is not separate from who you are. A business is an extension of yourself and your energy.
I truly didn’t desire to interact with anyone in the space anymore, customers included, because none of it mattered.
But I think how we come out of this collectively as women is to have a deep awareness of our triggers and allow them to be medicine.
We’re so quick to set unskilled boundaries, block, unfollow, ignore, delete, “trigger warn,” shun, and erase all traces of discomfort brought to us by other people. But the consequences of this are paramount and bleed into the next generations.
Maybe if we let our triggers be our medicine, we may discover the infinite well of belonging, enoughness, and connectedness.
With practice, I let my triggers be my guide and my medicine.
Whatever course of action I need to take thereafter presents itself to me organically when I’m rooted in my body and present to my surroundings. The medicine is there — it’s transforming me cell by cell.
After I paused the business I realized I belong to my Creator, and the Earth and my ancestors reminded me of this and continue to. I needed to halt everything and simply be. The timeline I’d been running on had expired.
I don’t need a business to belong. I don’t need followers to belong. I don’t need expired friendships to feel like I belong. I learned what I needed to and it was time to close the karmic cycle and rest.
And while the creation of formulations was such a beautiful and intentional process, it quickly revealed to me what I do and do not care to further nurture and develop in the realm of a business.
Skin, the organ, the science of it, the teaching of it, has never been my "passion" or deep interest. And neither has traditional ways of stewarding a business on social media which left me feeling fragmented, resentful, and depleted. (Partner giveaways, niching, kowtowing to other brands/influencers to get noticed, giving away free stuff with nothing in return, and oversharing as marketing, to name a few.)
And, despite what you see whilst scrolling, we are not machines that always need to be producing a new product, posting a new story, creating a new course, consuming more information, or talking about a new concept/idea.
The above is also not inherently bad. In a sea of socials and online businesses, though, I noticed how few and far between it was to see truly embodied businesses and it became energetically exhausting to be around. I felt like I had 13 different voices in my head from all the ways I should be.
I think with time, and deep cultivation of embodiment and energy mastery, one can build and operate a very successful and skilled online business. If that becomes my calling, I will answer the call.
I knew since the inception of this business (that is an entity of its own; that I am co-creating with) that what is meant to come through Guest House will change, will evolve, will birth, will bloom, will die... and emerge as something new. Again, and again.
Guest House has never been called Guest House Skincare or Guest House Beauty/Wellness/etc. for this very reason.
If there's only one thing I know to be true about my life it is that I came here to constantly transmute. To learn a lot and then to release everything I've learnt and let it fly away in the wind as I stand on the cliff waving to it from the shore.
And I also know that my name means brave (Tracy) breath (Abel) and that this is a brave breath in the flow of my life.
Guest House has been evolving into a new stage in the life cycle. What that is is a great mystery to me.
I'm not sure what the landscape will look like... only that it is a tiny seedling planted in fertile soils. The seeds need time to be nurtured and germinate, quietly and safely, and time to bloom.
So much is happening in the depths of the dirt month after month, year after year, that we cannot see. We aren't meant to see it — only to trust that it is happening.
Then, one day, there's a bush, a bud, a bloom.
I don’t belong anywhere, because I belong everywhere. Like fire, like earth, like water, like air.
In devotion to the life cycle,
Tracy
Loved reading this, feeling kindred ♥️