Wandering Through the Desert Alone

Or maybe not?

“When is it going to be enough for you to give up and quit?”

This simple sentence broke me. It would take me seventeen years to see how it fractured my soul.

Back in 2009, I was a Sales Director with Mary Kay Cosmetics. I had left a corporate career in occupational health and safety to pursue a heart-led life. I was married with one young child and expecting my second. Leaving a traditional career was a huge learning curve.

When people asked, “Why would you do that?” (and many did) I would always say “Love at first sight.”

This answer always prompted odd looks.

I was introduced to the story of Mary Kay Ash long after she had passed on. In her 50’s, she was faced with the obstacle of misogyny in her own career. Although a top executive at her firm, she was paid 50 cents on every dollar that the men were paid. When she raised this concern, her boss said, “Mary Kay, you are thinking like a woman again.”

She quit with the words, “And what is wrong with thinking like a woman?”

What followed was a simple business plan and a partnership with her son that led to what is still the #1 selling skin care product in the world. It is also the company with the most million-dollar female owners in the world.

More important than the earnings was the gift of Mary Kay’s heart. She taught a principle she called Go-Give, meaning live your life in a way that makes the world a better place for all who are touched by it.

Her goal was to enrich the lives of women with kindness, benevolence, and ethics, and that financial wealth comes when we focus on loving people, not money. She believed career came third after faith and family, and developed a marketing plan where the salesforce had ultimate autonomy and personal empowerment.

This concept of holistic business building, which considered spirit and emotion as important as physical success (if not more), resonated deeply with me. Today, many parts of my Wholeness Coaching practice have roots based in her example.

I plunged in deep and had highs, lows, wins, and losses. I approached the individual lessons as simply a part of a whole experience. Although numbers didn’t always add up immediately, I kept the big picture in focus, not the daily transactions. which I believed were distractions. I won my first car in about a year with Mary Kay, then became a Director in year two.

There is a part of me that grew up naturally facing obstacles with a dogged determination to find a way through. Upon reflection, I think my gift of vision (to see how things could be) allowed me to see the obstacles as small nuisances or stepping stones. I wasn’t accumulating evidence against myself or my vision.

I never thought of mistakes or failures as snowballs rolling down a hill, growing thicker with each rotation.

But something changed around the time of the picture above in 2009. I don’t know if I finally started listening to my inner critic or if I was incorporating the negative opinions of others close to me. I suspect it’s not a coincidence that this occurred as I became a mother.

First, the world’s feminine wound runs deep. Mothers are expected to be pure and angelic, a type of perfectionism that results in shame. The intense love I had for my babies triggered childhood wounds I forgot existed. Externally, mothers are often a target for unhelpful, unsolicited advice and criticism. Every single action I took was now a target for negative feedback.

Trying to balance mothering young children, running a business, being a step-mom, the housekeeper, and the wife through a new lens of perfectionist transactionalism was an exercise in futility. Unfortunately, the people I had entered relationships with piled more onto my plate than they did to help me carry it.

When I would ask why can’t you help? They would respond with because you didn’t do (insert transaction) to deserve my help.

Mary Kay’s messages of abundance were sometimes twisted to manipulate people into performative success. The husband I had chosen believed in the philosophy of tough love and treated every incident as evidence that I was doing something wrong that I could be taught to do better. In this pressure cooker of a life I found myself in, walking a tightrope of external expectations, I developed an autoimmune condition.

Of course, as I started to focus on transactions, my business started to flounder. I engaged in manipulation tactics to increase sales production. After a particularly hard month, I was crying to my husband at the time and he replied with, “When is it going to be enough for you to give up and quit?”

Even though I was falling apart, quitting was not once on my mind. I narrowed my eyes at him and said, “I don’t. I won’t give up.”

He shook his head and threw up his hands, a gesture that makes me cringe to this day. But the words stuck as proof that I needed to create evidence that my vision, my joy, and my goals were possible. My view became granular, dissecting every single interaction and momentary experience under a gigantic, critical microscope.

When you chase external expectations, you will never catch them. I tried for 11 years and ultimately left that marriage. Eventually, I left my Mary Kay business. I lived day to day, paycheque to paycheque, transaction by transaction, believing one big win would turn it all around. Not consciously, mind you.

Fast forward 17 years, and here I sit after seeing this photo in a memory carousel, randomly put together by my phone, writing an essay. It is fate that this photo came up today. Yesterday, I found myself bashed against the memory of that sentence, “When is it enough for you to give up and quit?”

Building my coaching practice, solo, without a roadmap like Mary Kay had for me, brushes up against my inner wounds all the time. It’s like a little bit of cheeky salt from God flung right into my reopened scars, but I am not always aware of them.

Yesterday, I spoke with a trusted mentor and thought I was asking a simple question about lead generation. I said I was curious because I’m clearly not doing something right based on my profit loss statements and the amount of appointments in my book. I also mentioned there may be a traditional job offer I was conflicted about because although the security would be welcome, I would feel like I failed as a business owner.

I thought I was asking from a place of strength. Regardless of the tone of this essay, I felt excited and optimistic. I believe I have found my voice and what my purpose is. But rather than sharing with me how they meet new clients, they took a different approach.

The response was an invitation to get inside my body and access my insight, that perhaps I need more soulful reflection. That even the difficult things are part of the whole experience. Why does taking a job mean business failure? Why can’t there be both? Not all answers come in “or” sometimes they come in “and” or “all”.

My body responded with rage, anger, hurt, and criticism. My internal dialogue sounded like, “I clearly can’t trust myself for these answers I have fucked my life up sideways and backwards more times than I can count. Even when I think I have grown I find myself at the bottom of the mountain again. I’m so stupid for believing I am on the right track. I just wanted a simple answer to a simple question”

Being an experienced coach and an intuitive they understood what was happening and took good care of me until the call ended.

But afterwards, I wandered around the day like I was lost. Wandering my own personal desert, no idea where paradise existed. I was curious as to what happened. Why was I so frustrated? Why did I feel so alone and isolated? Why did I feel so fractured? Why was I torn between options? Why is there another fork in the road with only two paths? Why did I feel so misunderstood?

Roxanne Howe-Murphy, in her writing, talks about the rubber band phenomenon. Where we move forward, we heal, we gain ground, but then something can “snap us back” to old patterns. I thought, what was I being snapped back to? Where is this rubber band attached to?

This is an important question to ask myself, I realize. My mind races to hundreds of examples where someone responds differently than I expect them to, and a shame spiral hits me hard. “I don’t know how to communicate well. I don’t know how to speak up clearly. I am too green to pretend I know anything about anything.”

Then the photo of me literally wandering alone in a desert pops up on my phone. Who took that picture? Oh yes, I remember, my children’s father. My mind wanders back to that time. During that trip, I was invited to participate in a local Mary Kay event in Las Vegas. I loved that event, I felt part of a community that I was contributing to. Then the memory of that one sentence uttered to me about quitting Mary Kay flashes in front of me brightly.

My soul says loudly, “You are collecting evidence. Your survival depended on providing transactions as evidence.”

There it is. The fracture that cracked my foundation.

That, unless I have collected, compiled, and submitted enough evidence…I am not. Not enough. Not that. Just not.

I can’t tell you what comes next, or how to keep bringing my view back to the big picture when I am ripping all my seams out, convinced I need to start over.

What I can tell you is that after this insight, I looked at the picture in the desert again.

Looking to the bottom left of the photograph is my oldest child, exploring the red rocks. I also realize I am five months pregnant with my son. I am carrying him inside of me.

I was never alone. I needed to see the whole picture.