Best Laid Plans

I've been working on this whole business building thing for over a year. Testing things out. Stepping out of my comfort zone over and over again. Learning about business development. Figuring out tech systems.

I was finally starting to “put myself out there” more. Asking for help more. Even playing around a bit on social media which I had been very resistant to before.

Then, whammo! My father went and broke his hip.

All the business stuff fell away. I didn't have the capacity, the attention span, or even the interest to do any more business stuff. All my focus shifted to my dad and making sure he would be ok.

I canceled events I had planned, one I had worked quite a bit on and was excited about in a lot of ways (and scared and unsure about as well). I put a hold on IU’s regular weekly events. I told members I wasn't sure when I'd be ready to host events again.

It's been a few weeks since my dad fell. Things have settled more. He received really good care at the hospital and was up walking a bit pretty soon after surgery. Now he's back home getting around with a walker and my help.

I'm slowly starting to re-engage with my business. I didn't completely let it go over the past few weeks. I attended a few events hosted by Heart of Business, a business development community I'm part of. But I wasn't doing much creating of my own.

Playing My Way Back

The other day I started playing around with AI videos for a game I'm developing. My dad was taking a nap and I was watching TV. I figured it was one small, easy thing I could do.

I loved playing video games with my friends when I was a kid. And when I was technically an adult though still basically a kid. It was fun working together to complete all the levels, beat the bosses, and get all excited when we won.

I want the scavenger hunt game to give some of that experience to anyone who plays it. Still working out how to do that through an email game that people play individually. But I thought some kind of character celebration that links to a button the player can push when they complete one of the levels would be fun.

AI is still pretty amazing and fun to play with sometimes. It's crazy to think the video below only took a couple minutes to generate and is pretty good. I typed in "a lady gnome video game character celebrating completing a challenge" and it gave me this.

She brought a smile to my face and helped rekindle my interest in developing the game and my business. And led to me writing this article :)

Share Your Story

Are you working on any creative projects? Is there one small thing you could do to re-engage with it if you've taken a break because life happened?

If you're willing to share, I'd love to hear if you've gone through or are currently going through something similar. You can email me at angela@introverts-unite.net to share your story privately with me. Or if you want to share more publicly, you can reply to this post on Bluesky.

Sometimes in life we run into obstacles, feel like all our well-laid plans are in shambles, and aren't sure we can keep pursuing our dreams. Sharing our stories with each other can help ease the feelings of shame, loneliness, and disappointment. And help us reconnect with our desires and get back to bringing them to life after the monkey wrench does its thing.

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