In recent months, now that I’m estranged from my entire family, I’ve been thinking a lot about choices.
How do I know if I’m making the right ones—how do any of us know?
Over the next week, I”m sharing a few posts exploring this question, both through the lens of my family estrangement, but also in light of some changes I’m making here at Real Magic School.
My hope is that you’ll find something here to bring clarity and peace to your own decision-making.
Let’s start with the business changes. If you, like me, are nosy about what goes on behind the scenes of someone else’s business, this one’s for you! 🤓
First, a quick summary of the changes:
- The Portal, my monthly membership, is ending March 2025. I’ll be packing all sorts of Jungian Magic goodness into the Portal between now and then. Join us here!
- I won’t be making any new products for the time being. I already have loads of cool Jungian Magic stuff in my shop, and I want to allocate more energy to launching my romantasy novel.
- Nothing will change with my New + Full Moon emails. (To sign up, click on Freebies in the menu at the top of this page and choose any freebie you like. That’ll add you to my Moon mailing list, which you can unsubscribe from at any time.)
The impetus for these changes came about when I was checking my website backend (I use WordPress + WooCommerce), and I noticed that some of my Portal subscription payments had failed. Again. It’s likely not because of anything on the subscriber’s end but due to a tech issue I’d run into a couple months back, one that was pretty frustrating to get resolved through WooCommerce support.
My initial reaction was to jump into fix-it mode, but something funny has happened throughout all of these family estrangements, the majority of which took place this year, many of them within the last three months. I’ve developed more tolerance for sitting with deeply uncomfortable shit before figuring out my next step.
So, I sat there, staring at those failed payments, sensing that something—an intuitive nudge, perhaps?—was trying to break through.
Yep.
Turns out, the insight was that I need to shut down the Portal.
Not immediately, so I checked to see when the last year-long subscription was expiring—March 2025—which just so happens to be the month after I hope to release my romantasy novel. (Goal: Valentine’s Day launch.)
March feels like a good time to wrap things up. It gives me another seven months of Jungian Magic fun, but right when I’ll be needing to focus a lot of effort on getting my book into the world, the Portal will be phasing out.
Right away, I felt a paradoxical mix of peace and panic. Sadness, too, because I love creating Portal lessons, and I love the very special group that has gathered in this little pocket of the internet.
The peace/panic combo is one I’m all too familiar with, and it really came into focus during my family estrangements.
Throughout these changes, when I was connected to my capital-S self, I felt peace—peace that I’d finally made a decision that was deeply supportive to my mental health and in alignment with my values. And then the panic of breaking the (family) rules would kick in, sending my stomach fluttering.
In recent months, though, I’ve gotten better at being with the inevitable fluttering, and every single time, it eventually yields to calm. Sadness, sometimes grief, too, but always calm, along with a potent sense of liberation.
But let’s get back to the business decision with a little backstory…
I began Real Magic School to create a home on the internet for my non-fiction books, and it soon morphed into a container for my experiments in Jungian Magic. I’ve been reading Jung’s work for many years, and I wanted a place to explore the countless intersections between psychology + my magical studies without running my friends ragged with my theories.
This is 100% me talking about Jungian Magic. It can be…a lot. 🙃
Fast forward to 2023, and after writing lots and lots of these New + Full Moon emails and creating courses and guides, I realized I wanted an even more specific container, one in which I wasn’t creating full-blown courses but could share bite-sized topics. Enter the Portal.
From the beginning, I knew it was going to be an experiment. I’d never offered a membership before, and I can see, looking back over earlier lessons, how my vision for the Portal morphed over time. I got better at anticipating what would be a suitable topic for a 3-4 lesson format, and I had fun creating guided meditations, worksheets, class sigils, and other materials.
This has been an important lesson…
…one I’ve also been learning through my romantasy writing, and that is:
Some Most of the time, you just gotta do the thing to see how it’ll pan out.
Sure, planning is great, but every time I take a thing from my head and into the wild it changes. No amount of planning will ever account for all the variables, and you can stay stuck in planning mode forever if you try.
It can be scary to do a thing publicly and then change your mind, but I’ve found that working through my ancestral patterns that equate changing my mind with failure helps me cultivate more bravery, curiosity, and a desire to experiment. (Important in business and in magic!)
On many, many counts, the experiment has been a success. I’ve met some incredible people, and I’ve had a place to share Jung’s work in what I believe is an inventive and magical way. Woot!
From the financial POV, though, this experiment has yielded less impressive results. To be clear, I’m so grateful for each and every subscriber who is making this work possible, including helping to fund this free newsletter. And I also need to be super duper honest with myself: I can’t continue this level of energy input for the amount that I’m making each month. It’s simply not a recipe for bills getting paid.
Here’s the thing: I have a feeling that if I really pushed on the marketing, I could build the Portal. When I was sitting at my desk, looking at those failed payments, that was one of the lightning bolts that struck. For maybe the first time, I was seeing very clearly the level of marketing I’ve done for this business.
Not the level of marketing I wish I were doing or that I theoretically could do, but how much I’ve actually done.
To put things in context, there’s a stark contrast between my marketing for Real Magic and what I did for my tiny food business, The Mouse Market, back in 2009 when I started it. I was consistently pitching my work to magazines and websites, I did a boatload of art shows, I regularly launched new product lines, and I was a BEAST when it came to building my mailing list.
Same deal with my bodywork practice. And guess what? Both of those businesses were very successful. The Mouse Market is still my day job, fifteen years later. In other words, I’m not sure that building a business is rocket surgery. I mean, sure, there’s a level of chance in everything we do, but there are also practices that, when done consistently over time, tend to work.
I had to get honest with myself: Why hadn’t I been doing this stuff for Real Magic?
Looking back, I had been doing those things in the beginning, and then I caught the fiction bug. Or rather, the bug had always been there, waiting on my shoulder for the right moment.
As I kid, I’d always assumed I’d be a novelist (and a veterinarian “on the side”—hey, I was eight), but somewhere along the way, that dream didn’t feel serious enough, or to use a word my grandparent would shower on me (while thrusting me onto a pedestal I’d eventually topple down from), not “impressive” enough. I needed to be impressive. And sure, if I could win the Pulitzer Prize with my writing, that might work, but a much more direct path to approval was med school.
Too bad that wasn’t at all where my soul wanted to go.
I tried, I really did, but some most days it felt like the only thing I was good at was amassing failures, big ones and small ones and everything in between.
Which brings us to a useful guidepost when making choices.
If a decision leads to you feel as if you’re continually fucking up, no matter how hard you try…this might not be the path for you.
Yes, even when we make a solid choice, things will frequently be challenging, especially if we’re pushing ourselves out of our comfort zone. Writing fiction isn’t any easier, really, than the other jobs I’ve had in my life, but the challenge is one that I want to take on more days than not.
Rather than feeling perpetually beaten down by writing, even when I have a tough day there’s something within me that looks forward to tackling it again tomorrow. I never, ever felt this way about studying organic chemistry. Never. It was just one long beat down.
To bring this back around to Real Magic, it’s not like writing about Jungian Magic doesn’t light me up. It does! And I intend to keep doing it, even once the Portal is no more.
But there are only so many things I can realistically devote myself to. Given that I can’t give up The Mouse Market, not until writing is consistently paying my bills, trying to spread myself between three businesses isn’t really working.
This, again, is where I needed to be brutally honest with myself…
…because I have inner parts who like to hold me to ridiculous standards and point to the fact that if I can do a thing, then I should. Because, technically, I could keep doing the Portal and running Real Magic at full capacity, all while trying to get my first book launched and writing the rest of my romantasy series.
But will I be doing a good job at any of these things? 🤨 Very, very debatable.
If all this should-ing leads me to take on too much, and then things don’t work as well as I’d hoped (like the Portal financials), these parts chalk it up to my failings as a human being.
If I really [fill in the blank with nonsense: was a good person, had what it takes to succeed, etc etc etc], then I’d be able to do everything at maximum capacity and get fantastic results with every single project. Huh?
This has a direct connection to my family estrangements…and that’s where we’ll pick up in a couple days.
See you then!
