What exactly are you paying for?

What do we pay for when we pay for sex, and why are people so resentful about it?

It’s incredible how much time we spend on fostering a loving connection that I frankly don’t know how anyone can afford to do it for free.

Marketing is not only a tool for finding new potential clients, but it’s a good way to filter out the ones that you wouldn’t click with anyways. When I advertise/post, I generally post about things that interest me, and the things that I want my clients to be interested in as well. When clients message me, they tend to mention books we’ve both read, podcasts we like, how charmed they are by my writing or interest in art, or any number of things in my marketing and social media channels that caught their attention. Like a plant exuding a particular sweet smell to attract a particular type of insect, marketing is a two-way conversation.

With that being said, it is a particular grievance and annoyance when someone can read your twitter, your website, your blog, scroll through your instagram and all of your paid advertisements, and then sit down to take the time to write you a message that says something along the lines of ‘I love your vibe and I think we would really connect, but you’re way too expensive for me.’

When I was in middle school my mom signed me up for a craft fair to sell the crocheted potholders I’d been making with thrift store yarn. It was a well-intentioned way for her to 1. Introduce me to the makers economy and hopefully let my hobby become a source of fun money for me, and 2. to get rid of all the potholders I had been obsessively churning out for months on end (hello ADD!). I went into the experience with the confidence of a 12 year old whose only feedback had ever been my alcoholic grandmother, who would lovingly tell me that each crooked and lopsided potholder I made was simply extraordinary, I’ve never seen such beautiful potholders! What came next was one of those Life Lessons that you do not ever forget; when I learned what ‘knowing your audience’ means and that, perhaps, the praise of my grandmother was not exactly a great indication of market fit or product viability.

I went home crying that day, with every single potholder I had made and stuffed them into a garbage bag that sat in the back of my closet until I went to college. When I was there, I remembered my time making all of them, and my enthusiasm. With a little more skill and patience under my belt, I knit them into a kaleidoscopic and slightly insane quilt that I gifted to my grandmother on her 90th birthday. When she opened it, a smile as warm as the sun lit up her face and she told me how proud she was of how far I’d come, and that they were still the most beautiful potholders-turned-blanket she had ever seen. That quilt was on her bed when she passed away, and I brought it back home with me where it now sits on my bed, a reminder of both where I came and where I can go.