190. What April has taught me.

Turning this newsletter into a fully paid one, feeling fear and doing it anyway, making my mind a nice place to live and pushing through.

If I had to sum up April with one word, it would be: change. Spring has arrived and I’ve woken up. I feel alive again and all of the energy that I’d been storing throughout winter hit me and catapulted me into this new state of being.

I was looking through my camera roll trying to remember what April last year was like, and on the outside it appears to be the same. The garden is green again, the tulips and daffodils came and went, the days got longer, the sky was bluer, and it was finally warm enough to wear shorts outdoors. Every single year I forget that Spring will come and that the freezing weather will be replaced with warmer days, but I think that’s the point of being human. When you’re fully submerged in it, you focus on getting through it and dealing with what you have in front of you day by day.

This month has been intense but in a really good way. I’ve felt discomfort in different aspects of my life and I’ve sat down and understood why I was feeling so weird. It’s because I’ve been feeling like I was stuck for a long time. I’ve been doing the same things for years and they used to feel challenging and scary, but now they feel like my everyday routine and there’s no longer any risk element. I’ve specifically been feeling this with this newsletter.

When I started POMELO three years ago, I was scared, worried, nervous, and had trouble sitting down to write every week. However, now it’s ingrained in my being, my days, and my weeks. There’s not a single day that I don’t write in some form, so I no longer feel the need to prove anything to myself. I’ve touched on so many topics none of them feel scary anymore. I’ve crossed the two thousand subscriber mark and I’m not interested in growing any bigger. I've come to realize that I’ve accomplished all of the goals I’d set for myself and that’s why I’ve been feeling lost.

I need ideas to work towards, goals or milestones that I can reach and feel like I’m growing and expanding; so I’ve set myself some new ones. I’ve decided to bet on myself and work through the fear the paid subscriptions bring me. This is something I’ve been working on in all aspects of my life this month: feeling like I deserve to earn money for the work I do and feeling like I deserve to be successful. I’ve never been afraid of failing, but I do have a lot of fear around success.

Every time I think about earning money from all of the things I do, I hear little voices in my head list all of the reasons why I don’t deserve it. I need to pay my rent as much as everyone else does, and just because I’ve chosen a self-employed or more freelance and artistic route doesn’t mean that I should have to starve to death. This being said, it’s still really scary and I’m still working on changing my way of thinking.

POMELO started with 0 subscribers and now it’s passed 2,000. That’s a lot of people, and 190 weeks is a lot of weeks of non-stop writing too. I feel like I need to push myself and face the things that scare me, because the feeling of being stuck was draining me and making me wonder if I wanted to just quit and move onto something else. The reality is that I want to be a writer, I am a writer, but I want to work as a writer. I got my first paid writer job in January and I’ve come to realize that if that person who hired me believes in my abilities and enjoys having me on their team, I can feel the same about myself — and, as a matter of fact, I have to feel the same way about myself, because another thing I’ve been working on is being my own best friend.