I refuse to be limited by the shame I feel

Especially when shame is not something I did to myself

Last year I started writing weekly columns about two of my favourite things.

One is talking about business. I love being able to find ways to drill down ideas and get my own head and the heads of the people reading my stuff thinking about business concepts in a new way - especially if we aren’t especially business minded.

The other thing I was writing about was my new love - my garden, and what has weirdly in NZ become known as homesteading. - it’s such an Americanism!

I’ve gone from a garden newb to someone who’s pretty much fully providing us with all the fruit and vegetables we need. It’s been a massive learning curve.

So I started a series of me writing about the lessons I was learning as a gardener, and new owner to chickens and more, and then linking it back to what I already knew a bit about - business.

This is, by the way, what’s called scaffolding.

It’s taking new information and applying it to a framework you already understand

This had two core benefits I could see.

First it meant I was able to pin my new learning on an old lesson I’d already learned

And secondly, it meant that those people who were more gardeny than me would be able to then maybe understand a business concept under the guise of my garden stories.

Honestly the weekly columns.were giving me a lot of joy. I’ve been someone who’s had to write, been a burned out writer, and someone who’s sometimes only motivation for writing was if I didn’t, my kids wouldn’t be able to eat.

Writing for pleasure?

Well something else entirely.

I had, of course, thought maybe I might turn it all into a “Beginner gardener’s guide to small business” Once an author, always an author?

Then over Christmas my three girls were talking about a family event they’d been to earlier that week - where one of my uncles, someone I have a lot of affection for, had been laughing about and joked about my writing.

It was like a massive stab in my heart. To be honest, writing that sentence felt that knife twist a little deeper again.

I instantly felt deflated. I felt embarrassed that someone I knew had been reading my stuff and thought it was “bad enough” to laugh at it. I mean we all know that some people won’t like us. Or our stuff. But to make it worse, it was someone I liked, who I have known all my life, and he’d done it in front of my girls.

I haven’t written another gardening story again. All the fun of exploration, the joy of it was gone.

I’ve thought about it though. I’ve watched the summer season gloss past, and thought of the things I’d have written about. But nothing’s made it to a page - not even a list of ideas.

I’ve been thinking about what stops us from showing up, and I have (very uncomfortably I might add), have been looking at this and wondered why I’ve allowed an indirect comment to affect me so badly.

And I know the answer is SHAME.