My launch failed—and it unlocked my ambition

On fear and grace and building the self-trust that lets you do the thing that scares you

Jul 22, 2025

I launched Self-Liberation Society a month ago and…no one signed up.

Apparently my system takes failure as a challenge, because ever since, I’ve been studying marketing, learning how to run ads, working on a whole plan for Joy Ninja with content pillars1, courses—basically, getting serious about being a content creator.

These are all things that I have circled around before, but never committing to.

For years, I have spun around in nebulous ambivalence:

“I don’t know if I want to do this”
“What if I don’t like it?”
“Learning how to run ads is overwhelming”
“I don’t like being sales-y”
“I refuse to email people 3x a week like these people do”

It turns out, none of that was actually the problem at all.

Apparently, the problem was just fear. And by doing something, I got past it.

I had the same kind of nebulous fears about SLS:

“I don’t want people to make me into their guru”
“What if the community breaks down into unresolvable conflict?”
“What if I stop wanting to do it?”
“I really like my autonomy…I don’t know if I want to commit to this”

And of course: What if I launch it and nobody shows up?

Without knowing what would happen, all my mind could do was reference social interactions from the past. It has no idea what it will actually be like to do something I’ve never done before. It can’t know that.

My fear wasn’t telling me about reality—it was telling me I lacked data.

My fear disappeared when I replaced my vague “what-ifs” with actual lived reality.

Which meant I had to do the thing and find out.

Of course, my body would rather read about it, talk about it, chat with AI about it, journal about it, and just generally angst about it than actually do it.

So, for future reference: If I find myself in the position where I have been ruminating about doing something for literally years, then the situation I am in is that I lack data.

And I lack data because I am afraid of doing the thing that would give me that data.

I needed to take a risk and grapple with the fallout until clarity emerged. I couldn’t just think about it—I had to act, to leap.

And yeah—I did feel sucky after I sent my “Hey, this thing you said you were interested in is open now” email, and got crickets.

But it didn’t kill me. And that is the threshold I had to cross. I had to prove to my nervous system—with actual lived experience—that I wouldn’t die if the thing I was afraid of happened.

And after I thought about it for like, two minutes, I realized, yeah, obviously I don’t have a big enough or consistent enough platform to get the result I was wanting here. OK. I just have to build that then.

I felt exhilarated that I took that step, even though it “failed”.

I needed to offer something to the world that cost money and was “me”. I’ve written on many different blogs over the years, but I have always made money in ways that felt a lot less personal—like making websites for people. There was no personal sense of risk to that, because the economic value is obvious and it doesn’t feel personally meaningful to me the way my writing does.

I was afraid of making an offer from my heart, and putting a price on it.

Writing for free did not feel like a risk for me. I could put my writing out there, and people could read it or not. I wouldn’t owe anyone anything and I could walk away anytime. And I have, many times—my writing momentum would just fade. I have stopped writing for months or years at a time.

I thought I was protecting my autonomy2—but I was really protecting myself from the feeling of rejection and not being valued for who I really am. That is an old wound that I experienced so much as a kid as I learned to be useful to others in exchange for safety and belonging and esteem. 😢

I had a deep doubt that anyone would value what I had to offer enough to pay for it.

There is a self-sabotage loop that goes like this:

You think you can’t succeed, so you only half-try.
You don’t succeed, because you only half-tried.
This reinforces the belief that you can’t succeed.

To get out of this, I needed to try at least to the extent that I was challenging my own fear. I didn’t need to jump in wholeheartedly with 1000% commitment—that’s just not going to happen if you are stuck in this pattern.

All I needed was to cross the line of doing something that genuinely scared me.

Not just something I was ambivalent about—but the thing that brought up a full-body sense of dread and the freeze response. I had to sit there and stare at the key I would press to do the thing, until I got up the nerve to press it.

And I did that over and over for SLS:

pressing the key to sign up for the Digital Ocean hosting where the forum lives
pressing the key to send my last newsletter where I wrote about it
and the final boss monster—pressing the key to send out the email to my “coming soon” list

I would become frozen with fear, and I had to just sit there with it until it subsided, and I could move forward again.

This fear is about more than wounds around value—it’s from being relentlessly bullied as a kid for just existing as myself. The two concepts got wrapped up together in my brain to become a terror of pursuing too much exposure as my authentic self. It’s one thing to quietly write in a dusty corner of the internet—but purposely trying to market myself? 😱 Staying below the radar has been my safe space.

I want to be super clear: none of this work involves pushing myself past fear.

Nonviolence is the bedrock of how I work with myself. I was trained in Hakomi and NVC, both of which are rooted in nonviolence.

“Feel the fear and do it anyway” is true—but that impulse arises naturally by sitting with the fear, and by developed self-trust by giving yourself what you need over and over and over again.

And sometimes what you need is grace.

Grace is what I gave myself when I was 10 and climbed up to the top of the high-dive, walked to the end of the diving board, stood there staring down at the water 60 feet below...and then walked back to the ladder and climbed back down.

I was embarrassed, but I was not ashamed. Because I was on my own side in that moment.

So when it comes to this threshold, I don’t feel like “Oh, I should have done this years ago”. I know I wasn’t ready years ago. All the work I did over those years is what made me ready.

I also don’t compare myself to other people who have a 6 figure content-creator businesses at like, 23. Who cares. They have a different nervous system, a different starting point, different karma to work through, and I’m not in a race or competition with them. Comparison is a form of violence.

I’m not willing to hurt myself to get results.

And that is still true. It will alway be true. My relationship with myself, and the trust I have built with myself, is more important than any ambition I will ever have. That self-trust has allowed me to get to this place, and trust myself enough to take that leap.

That is how I work with myself. That is what self-love means to me.

I don’t need to be violent to myself to get results anyway, because my intrinsic motivation is epically strong at this point.

I keep talking about intrinsic motivation because it is the strongest engine we have and it burns the cleanest fuel.

We can get motivation from lots of places, but bad fuel will destroy your engine. Fuel like fear, anger, spite, self-hatred, greed, urgency, obligation, self-sacrifice, or trying to prove yourself.

My authentic desire for impactful self-expression is already pushing me forward. I have things to say. I don’t need to add a go-faster thumb to the scale. That is just adding bad fuel to good, and poisoning the mixture.

Intrinsic motivation feels like a wellspring inside me that never runs dry. But it can recede out of reach if I don’t cultivate the conditions for it to flow freely. And those conditions involve safety, allowing, lack of judgement, and self-trust. In other words, a complete absence of coercion or force.

And yeah, it takes longer. But I spent that time healing, and it’s the time I needed to do that. There are no shortcuts when it comes to healing. You have to move at the speed of your nervous system and the pace that allows your most scared parts to feels safe with you.

So, where am I at now?

Self-Liberation Society is open—there are only a couple of us but I am committed to it, even if it grows slowly.
I changed SLS to be specifically for neurodivergent people. Most of my friends and probably a good chunk of my audience fall in this camp anyway.3 The more I thought about it, the more sense it made. We need spaces to explore who we are when we’re not masking. And autistic and ADHD liberation specifically is very close to my heart.

I’m working on building a body of work for Joy Ninja that translates my inner-work discoveries into tools that other people can use to free themselves from internal limitations. The first thing I put up is a free ebook called, “How to Stop Being Cruel to Yourself” that is about working with the inner critic.

I have a lot of ideas, and I’m excited. It’s time for me to fly, and see how high I can go. 🚀

I’m sure I will uncover more layers of fear, but I know what to do with them now. I know if I just go up to the edge, I can sit there as long as I need to, until I’m truly ready to leap. 💚