It’s Time
It’s time….
Eight years have passed in the blink of an eye really. They have blown past me while blessing me with a new house, new baby and ultimately a new purpose. Prior to starting Adored Illustrations I floundered wondering what I was meant to do with my life. Working in the banking industry certainly didn’t fulfil me in the specific way I knew I needed to be fulfilled. Writing has been a little known love of mine since I was young – I have notebooks filled with poems detailing my first heartbreak, friendship breakdowns, my parents divorce – if it happened to me there is a poem about it. If you affected my life in any way there is a poem dedicated to you buried deep in a box somewhere. Writing saved me when I felt like I couldn’t save parts of myself and if I’m honest writing The Enchanting ABC saved me in ways I can’t even articulate.
I came up with the idea of The Enchanting ABC while on the bus home from said banking job. Deflated, defeated, but wanting more. Instagram in 2017 was just beginning to really take off and I toyed with the idea of starting an account for my then four-year-old daughter and creating the token ‘influencer’ account. But I also knew that didn’t align with me and what I ultimately wanted to do. I knew I wanted to create ‘something’ and suddenly one random bus trip home it hit me – I could write a children’s book. I started following the only other two self published authors I could find at the time and looked at what was trending on Instagram, what was popular and specifically what art work mothers were purchasing for their children’s room (again a huge movement in 2017). I wanted the book to mean something and that’s why I created it for Ayla, my daughter and made it a book I knew she would love, but also a book I couldn’t find. It’s hard to explain in words how an idea actually unfolds but it all literally ‘fell’ into place quite quickly and before I knew it I had written the book and had artists working on the illustrations and shipping quotes in my inbox.
When I look back at that time of my life with a four year old and two year old, working part time and starting this business it was certainly one of the most chaotic times of my life. It’s also one that I am most proud of. I had a goal, I knew what I wanted to do and I did it. Apart from the desire to become a mother I don’t think there had ever been anything I wanted as much as I did this business. But it’s the sort of want you don’t really speak out loud until you’re in it because it sounds too far fetched. Even now when I look at my business I can’t quite believe what I created and accomplished – nine books, puzzles, flash cards, games and a baby journal and milestone cards. The business ebbed and flowed with me, it changed as I did and that’s why ultimately, I’ve decided to close down the retail side and spend my time focusing on writing my novel and hopefully more poetry. My life has ebbed and flowed to the point now where the business I created is no longer sustaining me the way it once did.
Eight years I have spent running and loving my business. That’s one-fifth (unfortunately) of my life. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that this change aligns with turning 4-0. It may also align with my running obsession which sees me having anywhere from 2-4 hours a week to focus on my own thoughts and process what the future might look like for me. And what I do know more than anything else is that I’m meant to write – I hope that I can align my poetry writing with my novel writing and come up with something spectacular. But for the past year I haven’t written a single poem. Not because I don’t have the words to share, but because I don’t have the time to write them. Closing Adored Illustrations will give me back the time I have lost. There is still plenty of stock to sell and I’m excited to move the business to focus solely on wholesale. But gone are the days of creating FB ads, email campaigns, social media posts, writing new children’s books, creating new stock and ordering and coordinating the shipment of that stock. Eight years of living a life that I loved but love changes as we grow and as much as I will always love what I created, it’s simply no longer serving me. So it’s time to move onto the next creative love of my life – I’m hoping it’s a novel that emotionally wrecks those reading it but the thing I love most about my crazy, chaotic, creative mind is I never know what it’s going to give me. Stay tuned.