Chapter three – my superpower.

At the start of 2017 I was feeling lost, I knew one thing for certain, I needed to make some changes to how I was working. I met Ann English at Lumely Castle to do my VisionTree for Travelling Ava. We sat together for an afternoon, talking about all of the things I was doing and my many ideas for Travelling Ava. Ann is more than a little bit magical, and she has a talent for helping people identify their superpower.

There are two things I remember clearly about this afternoon. 

The first thing was Ann telling me that I was a storyteller, that this was my superpower, and  I wasn’t a creative entrepreneur. Ann had recognised something in me that I had never said out loud for a long time, not since I was a little girl. I wanted to tell stories, I wanted to write a book. I wanted to tell the stories from the Isle of Neverwas and share Travelling Ava’s adventures. Ann’s talent for identifying superpowers made me feel a little bit braver and gave me the confidence to dream bigger.

The second thing I remember was her wise advice. I needed to stop chasing every shiny idea. I needed to capture them so I didn’t lose them. Ann suggested that I write my ideas down and keep them safe in a treasure box. We had talked about my ideas, and the recurring theme was that I was chasing each possibility for all of my creative ventures. But I wasn’t getting anywhere because I would abandon one idea and move on to the next. Her suggestion to write my ideas down meant that they weren’t going to escape; I wasn’t going to lose them. They would be safely tucked in the pages of my notebook, waiting for me. I didn’t have to do everything all at once. 

When I was little my mam and dad bought me a typewriter, a huge old fashioned thing that sat on a fold up table in the living room. When I was in primary school I wanted to be a writer, this was actually my first dream, I loved telling stories. I never finished them but would love writing and letting my imagination dance across the page. I would start and abandon stories over and over again right up until the moment I returned to university to train to be a teacher. When my mam said “don’t lose yourself” this was the thing that I had lost. I had stopped writing my stories and expressing my creativity. I had stopped letting my imagination play.

After leaving Lumely Castle I embraced this new direction and started to make my plans for Travelling Ava. Once I stopped chasing all the bright, shiny ideas and wrote them down in my journal, I was able to achieve some of the goals I had identified when I was creating my VisionTree with Ann. Travelling Ava had her own website with blog posts from her adventures around the world. She had a growing social media platform, and I was able to write some of her adventures with her magical friends. I had also worked with an author to create a pattern for one of her books and published my patterns on Ravelry and LoveCrafts with regular downloads. I also achieved my dream of being one of the featured designers in Simply Crochet magazine for an issue. Journaling has helped me to slow down, develop my ideas, and take the impactful action I needed to make my dreams a reality. 

I slowly started to move forward, leaving behind the things that were no longer serving me. I left the projects, I left the bathroom showroom and focused on Travelling Ava and my teaching job. By the end of 2019 I made the decision to leave education altogether. I was done. My part-time job wasn’t feeling very part-time and I wasn’t earning enough. I wanted a job that would free up my time so I could focus on the thing I was meant to be doing.

Thank you so much for reading to my story so far, it continues next week with Chapter 4. Take care beautiful daydreamer.