Tuesday 7 October 2014

CAN I GET A STRAITJACKET WITH THAT COMMITMENT?

I’ve been and gone and done it, then – leased myself some storage space with Big Yellow so I can acquire a whole lot of stock to offload on Ebay, Ebid.net, Amazon and elsewhere. It does feel like quite a commitment, and financially it certainly is exactly that. Not that it was all that expensive – my quote was for an extra free month on top of approximately £50 a month including insurance. Plus a security deposit of one month too. Still, speaking as a LUB – that’s Lazy Unemployed Bum to the uninitiated – it feels right now a bit of a millstone round my neck.

Certainly it means I have to act on it: with an invoice for £50 coming in every month I will need to be out there sourcing stock, photographing it, listing it. And hopefully with that will come all the associated work of extra sales: wrapping, updating listings, posting, keeping accounts.

Of course having this leap into the dark coincide with the credit crunch doesn’t inspire masses of confidence, exactly. But then, there’s always some reason not to take a risk, not to put yourself out there: if it wasn’t the crunch then I’m sure I could come up with a dozen other reasons why now isn’t a good time.

On the day I actually went to take possession and load up the tiny unit with a few boxes, I felt such a massive, sweaty resistance. It was as if every fibre of my being was just trying to hold me back, refusing to budge, shouting, ‘NO!’ It didn’t feel like intuition: it felt like fear. Fear of a huge, irrevocable step – a step that might lead to great things, and maybe that was half the trouble. If I’m not an underachiever, a failure, a LUB – then who am I? How will I recognise myself when I look in the mirror? I’ve read a lot of Barbara Sher and I thought I recognised the feeling from some of her books. It wasn’t trying to protect me. It was trying to sabotage me with the desire for safety and familiarity – even though the familiar can be very unsafe indeed.

But I thought of Goethe – or whoever is in fact responsible for that famous quote, the ‘Boldness has genius, and power, and magic in it,’ one – and pushed through the resistance. Just steadily refused to acknowledge that inner voice, and instead chatted and joked with the guy on reception, filled in reams of paperwork, and… committed myself. Maybe they should have given me a complimentary straitjacket.

No comments: