My EntrepreneurShip Has Capsized

“You’re so entrepreneurial,” they told me. Friends, relatives, coworkers, bosses, acquaintances, mentors, even strangers. They told me for over 20 years.

As a child dragged along to fairs and festivals for my father’s own business ventures, I always found something to sell. Baskets of blackberries, braided bracelets, bouquets of blooms, anything I could think of to make a buck.

At six years old, my brother and I, along with our best friends, made our own little newspaper publications and rolled bay leaf “cigarettes”, and sold them to our parents and other adults who happened to be around.

A cooperative knitting business began with a few friends around age eight. We knit scarves and pouches and tried to sell them from our parents’ farmers market booths.

In high school, I got really into crochet, and a teacher encouraged me to enter a local youth business competition. I had sold a couple of crocheted scarves and I had this idea that I’d “crochet my way to college.” I really fleshed out my plan for the presentation, getting into details about materials, labor, profits, and why handmade products of natural materials are important. I even had a scheme for how I could turn this into a franchise: I’d teach other young people how to crochet and give them instructions for creating various products so they too could pay for college.

I did NOT pay for college this way. But I did sell on Etsy and do custom crochet and knitwork for many years. For a few years I thought I’d be a knitting pattern designer. I wrote a few patterns, had a few sales, but no real “success” because I didn’t have it in me to do any marketing. I just wanted to make stuff.

For as long as I can remember I’ve had this thought that one day I can make a career out of crocheting, knitting, or quilting, whichever craft I was most absorbed in at that moment. It took most of my life to realize: I never was entrepreneurial, I was just poor. I wasn’t really trying to start a business by selling bracelets at a festival, I just wanted some pocket money. I’ve always been insecure about money and so it’s only natural that money is in my peripheral with everything I do.

Now, while I’d still love to quit my day job and focus on my own projects (who wouldn’t?), I’m now viewing that job as liberating in a sense. Of course this job is all tied up in the capitalist system. But it provides me enough income to meet my needs, and that means I don’t have to sell my art. I can go to work, come home and make to my heart’s content, anything I feel like. I don’t have to choose only one craft and niche down. That’s business, but art doesn’t flow that way. I can leave projects unfinished, I can stop fretting over how I *should* be more active on Instagram.

I can create freely and contemplate deeper meanings in each piece of work, not just think whether or not someone might like to buy it. I can simply make for making’s sake.

I still have to constantly remind myself that I’m just making to make. That I don’t need to try and sell my work. That I can give it away or abandon it in a park or bury it in a streambed, or anything I feel compelled to do.

I am so excited. I am so excited to grow more into myself while stepping out of some of the capitalist chains I was born into. I am so excited to make more, to write more, and to share with you some of my artful creations and contemplations.