It feels selfish to write for myself rather than for others, but my heart is swollen with choice, love, more and the fleshy tears sting. Some days everything is so together. A perfectly tied package I can stack in the corner with others more or less like it. Other days are much more interesting. My strangeness causes so many issues, but in the issues I find so much more than this everyday push.
Onstage, I have begun to feel more at home in a foreign place than I have anywhere else. I am stranger, but it’s accepted and an expectation that I must be. The friends I’ve become closer to through this latest rehearsal process have shown me glimpses of myself I haven’t seen in years. I’ve been performing, but I haven’t given it everything it deserves.
Now the tattered trappings of hope shoved in trunks and forgotten in favor of putting out the moment’s fires have found their way to the top of my heart, and I find myself carefully trying them on, seeing if they finally fit right. And when I look in the mirror, I realize it suits me.
I want Paris. I want adventure. I want freedom. Everything in me is calling out and screaming and begging to run to those places whispering my name.
If my words were powerful enough to elicit that constant wind that knows you know it’s time to move on, I’d cry it out here until nothing but understanding remained. But I’m not sure I could do the wind justice. She knows me so well, and she knows the sway she holds over me. I don’t pretend to have the presence of mind to bottle her up for others to see.
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Dusti Arab, Fractional CMO
And the founder of the reinvention co, a marketing consultancy specializing in working with personality-driven companies with small teams.
Intense, fun, and relentlessly practical, Dusti understands the lives of small business owners are deeply intertwined with their businesses, and if their marketing is going to be sustainable, it can't get in the way of why they do what they do. (And honestly? It should be fun so they actually want to do it.)
She is the host of Referral Worthy, a podcast for small business owners ready to go from "best kept secret" to the go-to name in their niche.