After a year of selling dolls full-time, attending a Tonner Doll factory sale, and gaining a new client, I took a good, hard look at my eBay income for the last several months and realized that I was making a living wage selling all of these stunning dolls on eBay. Could I really survive on dolls alone? I felt confident that I could and so I hung up my job-seeking hat and settled into my new entrepreneur shoes; and they felt really comfortable, like a well-worn pair of walking shoes that you trust to get you through the day. With the passing of my mom, an aunt, five weddings all over the country, and a trip to Italy, this new “career”, with lots of flexibility, couldn’t have come at a better time. 2008 was a heartbreaking, challenging and busy year, I don’t think I said “no” to any opportunity to get out of town and escape reality for a brief period of time. When I was at home I would keep myself busy with a multitude of friends. I created a lifestyle scenario where I didn’t have time to think about the loss of my mother and how different it was really going to be not having her around anymore. The “Lost Soles of the Highway” project had, at some point along the way, been put on the back burner. I reached my goal of finding 50-75 lost shoes on the sides of many roads and did some research on how to get a book published. I had to write a “query letter”…a query letter? Finding examples of such online back them wasn’t as easy as it probably is today. I drafted a couple of said letters but fear set in and I pushed it all aside, this was out of my comfort zone and I certainly didn’t want rejection from this passion project that had played a significant role in my coming to be a self-assured, independent woman. I held onto hope that the Universe, just as it had provided me with rainbows, would also provide me with someone who could guide me through this very unfamiliar and uncharted territory. I stopped carrying my camera with me in the car and eventually that fear of getting out of the car to take photos of the shoes, that fear that I worked so hard to overcome, crept back into my life. And I let it win. I would continue to spot shoes on the sides of roads and yell out “SHOE”, but I would keep on driving; the thoughts of pulling over and getting out there for everyone passing by to stare at took back its control over me and I would only stop on the occasion that there was absolutely no one around or if it were super convenient. I had no desire to ditch the project; I was bound and determined to do “something” with it…one day.
On a "brave" day.