I Won't Blame Myself. But I Will Take Responsibility.

On letting my dream business fall apart, refusing the shame story, and continually choosing the success of Love over The Love of Success.

As I’ve been dancing around creating online again after almost 2 years of fullllll intense initiatory immersion in my real life and awkward-to-me silence in my online life, there are moments where I feel embarrassed about letting my previous dream creative online business fall apart.

Moments where the pain-shame-programming creeps its crooked claws around my throat and has me doubting… fucking everything… that I worked so hard to know about myself and about Life. And that I once preached from the rooftop of my Instagram account, certain I had figured something out that I would stick with for a long, long time. Like rubbing salt in the ego wound to say this outloud.

The thing is, that younger version of me wasn’t wrong. She wasn’t lying. She was living it in depth and breadth that genuinely blew her and the people around her away on the daily.

The online content/coaching/course business I created was the embodiment and authentic expression of over a decade of deep healing and dedicated study in the making before I ever made my first Instagram post. I can still hold steady and tall when I say, I was walking the walk. Even in moments I got distracted or caught up in this or that trending thing or person. ;)

The business I built from Jan 2018-Oct 2024 was my heart’s truest expression in every evolution it saw (storytelling to subconscious/somatic coaching to intuitive life design and home design to embodied creative business creation to merging them all together as one energetic expression of what it means to design a life you love) and was highly automatable and scalable and required relatively little effort to continue making more impact and income if I just doubled down on what I had already invested ooooodles of energy, effort, time, and money into creating.

So, like, it seemed dumb to stop it altogether and go quiet instead of giving it whatever it took to keep it going? At least, to onlookers who didn’t really understand what energetically went into creating it or how it felt to live within it as I/my life evolved.

I once loved that business with everything I had. Showing up for it, creating it, sharing it once truly madly deeply set me freeeeee in life. And then. It didn’t.

The business that before babies became my whole personality started to feel stale. Like an old version of me? Like, if I continued on with it I’d be forcing, faking, proving… which goes against my entire ethos in life and the ethos of the work I was offering before.

I started feeling it after bringing my twin daughters home from the NICU. I thought it was life circumstances so I doubled down. I hired brilliant beautiful business and marketing coaches to help me strategize, streamline, scale, and call me out when I got “off course”. I re-positioned, maybe trying to re-inspire myself with a new flavor? I re-sold tried and true courses because I knew they were created in the energy and inspiration of aliveness and truth and would still serve someone. But they weren’t serving me anymore. And the more I tried to strategize, structure, streamline, outsource my felt sense of this ain’t it anymore through it to smartness… the more distant and dissonant I felt with it all.

I started to recognize in my deepest integrity and widest embodiment that the business that was once my dream come true was ready to die and rebirth into something I couldn’t feel or see, let alone articulate or broadcast in a meaningful way.

The business that went from feeling like aliveness and alignment and abundance of my highest expression to… a mental and emotional drain that pulled me away from my babies and husband and aging family members who needed so much more than they were getting.

And I really didn’t know what to do about it except for to… Let Go and Let God.

I’ve had moments of judging myself hardcore for not doing one of the things I used to believe in and back wholeheartedly (ie preach on the internet)—letting the pain of my circumstances grow me and my capacity to show up bigger than I thought I could.

Choosing my desired vision. Alchemizing pain to power. Turning the limitations into limitless possibilities and aligned intentional action. Getting buckwild with creativity. Playing the long game of business and abundance and online art!

But the reality of my life (well, really of my development at that moment of my life) was such that I knew I was being called into a personal and familial presence and healing that… I really didn’t want to sign up for.

I couldn’t see clearly exactly what it was I was signing up for until recently, almost 2 years after the descent. Like, this last month was the breakthrough of lifetime breakthroughs and in hindsight I can’t believe I didn’t see it more clearly but also of coouuurrrsse I didn’t because I was IN IT and it was intense as all get out. But also a dream come true. How does one reconcile that while in the thick of it?!

I could blame motherhood; having 3 babies in 13 months alone will challenge even the strongest resolves. (If you know me, you know I won’t. I thrive in the juggle, even when I totally don’t wanna. Motherhood has made me more Me, more Free than anything else has. Healing, business, marriage, all of it. I recently read this article Your Baby is Your Shaman and couldn’t agree more.)

I could blame my larger family system or the larger American culture that has left vulnerable young mothers with babies and aging family members out to fkn dryyyy, isolated and under-supported in their most tender years. (Won’t do that either. But I do have things to say.)

I could blame myself for taking on too much responsibility for too many people/places/things. Or for not being logical/strategic enough in business and putting too much emphasis on energetics and emotions in something that could be a simple scalable system. I could judge my nature for swaying too far into the wild intuitive emotive creative feminine mystic instead of grounding more fully into the material entrepreneurial lawyery smarty pants I could easily tap into. Or for the ways I’ve let myself play into larger familial dynamics that looped me back into old patterns of pain-shame-programming I thought I had transcended LOLOL - they say, “You think you’re conscious? Spend a week with your family…” I say, “try moving in with them then we’ll really talk.” OH MY GGGOODDDDDDD WTF WAS I THINKINGGGGG. And also it’s one of the best things I’ve ever done, my Grandma is my whole entire heart and seeing my babies crawl all over her every day, seeing them hang with both their great grandma and grandma - my MIL who I also love, love, love - is the ultimate epic irreplaceable peak experience of life.

I won’t blame myself.

But I will take responsibility.

For my fear, conditioning, constructs, shadowy bits and smallness… for my actions and words and lackthereof and edges of growth that can’t come with me into this next stage of Beingness.

And.

I’ll also take responsibility for being a human who continues to choose Love, beauty, alignment, aliveness… even when it looks like chaos and destruction and disappearing into the fog.

I’ll take responsibility for practicing what I preached in my embodiment-forward business even when it looked like burning the business to the ground and doesn’t compute to people around me. Because I’ve always been about how it feels to actually live within > how it looks to onlookers.

I’ll take responsibility for being a fierce, repetitive chain breaker in my lineage—first in the creation of mental-emotional-relational-spiritual-physical health and relationships and lifestyle. For breaking the chains of inner dis-ease and performance/proving/role-playing that was once required to survive, especially as a woman, but no longer does unless we choose it to. (Well, where I live. I won’t get into the heartbreaking conversation of the state of women’s rights around the world.) For choosing the wells of well-being, connectedness, creativity, Love.

And I’ll take responsibility for now breaking chains in my lineage’s experience of business, finance, career. My grandpa broke the financial poverty cycle in my family line in a big way, but he did not break the abuse-neglect-emotional poverty that has created a string of angry repressed depressed addicts and a fractured family.

I’ve become the first in my line to choose well-being not just for myself, but the family system as a whole. Not just for my children. For my grandma and mother-in-law who I live with. And for other extended family members I’ve shown up for in bigger ways than anyone has seen online. I’ve prioritized my people before money/success. A dynamic I thought I had overcome when I created a business I loved and made money being true to my heart but am only beginning to see how it was easy to choose my family over money/success when I already had it and when it felt good to make it. When I could wholeheartedly say, “You don’t have to choose! You get to have both!” My real life curriculum in this experience—the generational test/pattern break—was choosing my humans and our hearts when it looked like letting the money/success go and taking massive risk that could be (and has been) judged as irresponsible, unintelligent, and privileged as a character flaw instead of as an opportunity to embrace intentionally and graciously.

When it looked like… closing the “I Made It!” business and living on savings and moving away from the life, friends, connections, careers, and communities we created in a city we loved… to go be with living ancestors and give our children a different experience of life than the ones we inherited. Trusting that the work would come back into fruition when the time was right, that we have been blessed with the options and opportunities we have because they are meant for us, and that there are more important things in life than stacking bills and showing the world how important and successful we are.

When I wholeheartedly realized, I would have to choose between the two. At least in that season.

Living into the question I’ve been living into for the last decade…

What does it mean to choose and create a life oriented around the success of Love, instead of oriented around The Love of Success.

What does “Having It All” actually mean? Look like? Feel like? To the most honest, authentic alive, and free me.

Xx Bryanna