In Our Guts We Trust | What to Expect from VictoriaKay.co

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

Robert Frost’s The Road Not Taken was some of the only assigned reading in high school that I truly loved. It felt empowering, to see myself as a lone wanderer facing a choice: there are two roads, and I get to pick which one to travel.

As an adult, I became frustrated at Frost. Where does one find these roads, anyway??

I felt like I was on some treacherous, winding path that never diverged; there was no fork, no choice but to go anywhere but forward.

And, starting in 2021, I desperately did not want to go forward anymore.

There were plenty of reasons I felt that way, but the why isn’t important for this story. Something in me shifted that year. I felt myself giving way. I turned 27, and I remember explaining that it felt just like being 17 — I had all these big emotions, all this energy begging to be released in something reckless. But, now, unlike at 17, “reckless” has real-world, big-girl consequences.

I couldn’t drink myself into a stupor, find a boy to ease me back into my body, leave without looking back, like I might have as a teenager. I had rent to pay now. The only way through is forward.

I’d been working for myself for a few years by this point, and that was basically all I did. Chunks of my life during this time blur together in my memory, because there isn’t much to remember. If someone had asked, “Who are you?”, I wouldn’t have said that I am patient or kind or compassionate; I would have said that I’m a virtual assistant. I’m a podcast manager. I’m a project planner. Whatever role my clients asked me to fill became my identity; work was inextricably linked to my personhood.

So, when my personhood felt challenged — when I felt the fiber of myself slipping away — the obvious answer felt like changing what I do for work.

I thought about becoming a virtual event planner, a stationery designer, a Notion workspace developer, so on and so on until I decided to stop chasin’ waterfalls and called myself a “systems strategist”.

That worked out fine — for a while. But something continued to gnaw at me. I could cover this crisis in pretty brand colors, I could try to talk about it in my newsletter, but I knew, in my bones, that I would eventually have to face it head-on. In private. On purpose.

I always understood that Frost’s poem was a metaphor; of course there were not two actual roads tucked into a yellow wood. I knew it was meant to represent the different choices that we make in life.

But what I missed in all of my readings was that we get to decide the choices.

The poem isn’t just about choosing between two paths; it’s about the power in creating paths ourselves, in places where no defined road exists.

Slowly, as I began to grapple what this meant, the fork appeared before me.

A Year of Coming Home

I sort of anticlimactically realized that I could do anything. I don’t just mean in a productivity sense, or in what I do for work. I mean it in a literal, universal sense.

I could go join a circus. I could train to climb Everest. I could train to become a deep sea diver or a mystic or a waitress. I could start a band or take a vow of silence.

I could walk down to the park and play on the swings. I did, and it turns out the swings don’t ask your age.

This might sound completely pedestrian to you. Perhaps you’re thinking, “Of course you can do any of those things!”

But no one ever told me that. Maybe you’re reading this and realizing that no one ever told you either.

It was like a stumbled upon this ancient secret that had been hidden from me. Like I was in a house of doors, built and labeled by tradition and expectation, with this artefact gathering dust in the basement.

I was angry. The rage I felt, understanding the magic that had been kept from me… It was consuming.

If you are a certified People Pleaser, have experienced trauma, or just exist in this world as a woman or other marginalized identity, I bet you know something about rage, too. It’s such a visceral feeling, when you realize you’ve been bested somehow — when you discover that you have not had access to the information, autonomy, liberation, and peace that you are entitled to just by being a person.

When you have to discover and create those things for yourself.

As a result, I took a year off from business. Not from work — bills don’t stop for crises — but from the constant chaos of creating and marketing and growing and selling and and and. If I could do anything in the whole world, spending my time on those things felt like a betrayal to my inner world.

I didn’t really mean to do it; business just organically became a lower priority than self-discovery and healing. It took me a while to retire the muscle of monetization; every time I rediscovered or delved into a passion, I had to silence that old voice trying to box everything into a business model.

It took several months of frustration and realization before I truly silenced the noise and allowed myself to just be. To follow curiosities without an agenda, to intimately know myself without seeking validation, to write without wanting an audience, to dive into the layers of my identity without the pressure of an elevator pitch on the other side.

The good news is that it worked.

I ended 2023 a profoundly new person. Or, rather, a newly understood person. I found the depths and strength of self-love, the pure joy of isolation on the untrodden path. I wasn’t changed so much as I had come home to myself.

(Which is not to say that the work is over — just that it’s off to an incredible start.)

Today, as I write this, I’m finally ready to share a bit of what I’ve learned.

Not as a coach or a guide or a teacher, but as a woman who exists next to you in this complex, wonderful, frightening life. As someone who maybe sees things a bit differently than you, or as someone who puts words to what you’ve known all along. Maybe as someone who makes you go, “Finally! Someone like me!”

This isn’t a business. It’s an experiment.

Knowing and honoring myself has led to one inescapable conclusion:

I don’t mean that working online is bad — at all. This is my love letter to working online.

This is me believing that a hyper-connected world can, and must, be made up of more than calls-to-action and AI-generated mush. It’s me trusting that we can use our businesses and the web as a whole as tools without our selves getting sucked into the ether. It’s a rejection of the “scope creep” of corporate goals and ideologies seeping their way into our work. It’s a fundamental belief that we all have something to say and share and give.

This is me saying that we can do both: We can have a healthy business doing exactly what we want to do while staying true and connected to our identities.

Or, at least, this is my experiment in seeing whether that’s possible.

That means I’m building victoriaykay.co, at least for now, as a niche-free zone. I’m not throwing a title in my bio or calling myself an expert of anything or limiting the adventures I get to go on in my own little corner of the internet.

Instead of focusing on what I do, I’m focusing on how I do it.

I’m using three guiding principles to light my path: Atomicity, Accessibility, and Adventure.

Atomicity refers to the fact that everything I create will be focused on one thing. I’ve spent countless hours on products that promised to do things “all in one place”, on workspaces that promise to consolidate every damn thing in your business. Not anymore. I want my products to be more like LEGO kits: I give you some blocks, and you can follow my build instructions, or you can create something wholly unique to you.

Accessibility means a few different things for me. I want to ensure that everything I create is accessible both to different types of abilities and in terms of pricing and understanding. I don’t want to put anything out that has “pre-requisites” or that has arbitrarily high prices. I want you in my world, and I don’t want you to suffer (in your wallet or energy) because of it.

Finally, adventure is just what it sounds like. I’ve titled my paid newsletter “The Whim” because that was the original brand name I was going with before I decided to use my own name. It encompasses everything about adventure that I want to embody with this project. I want to follow my whims as they come, meaning that I don’t have a standard service list, I’m not creating content plans months in advance, and I am following the rabbit holes as I find them.

Are you in for the ride?

Even if all of that makes sense in my own head, I understand if you can’t quite see where I’m going with this.

Here’s a quick bullet breakdown of what I plan to do with victoriakay.co:

• My focus, for now, is on writing about and creating resources for small online business owners who feel like they’ve lost their identity in their work. I want to help you come back to yourself and your joy.
• I will be sharing newsletters and articles here. I’m planning to release at least one free newsletter every two weeks, but for $5/month, you can join The Whim, my paid newsletter, for daily prompts and other exclusive content.
• I will still be creating products, including tech tools, templates, and tutorials. You can find those over on Gumroad. Some of these products will be similar to what I created with The Systems Lab, but I’m expanding to include some personal quality-of-life products as well. Again, signing up for the newsletter (free or paid) is the best way to stay up-to-date on new releases and sales.

If you’re still not sure whether this is the right place for you, here are some signs my articles & resources might be right up your alley:

• You own a small online business with 5 or fewer team members.
• You feel a deep sense of dissatisfaction or resistance to your business and you know “scaling” or “optimizing” is not the answer.
• You’re already tired of the AI garbage being published online and are looking for fresh, humanized takes on the online business world.
• You’re deeply curious about your identity and want to dive more deeply into your inner world.
• You’re a pragmatist, but damn if you don’t feel pulled toward spiritual practices.
• You’re kind of sick of everyone being an expert? You want to be around people who have different skills and perspectives than you, without always being told what you should / have to do.
• You’re a recovering people pleaser, eldest daughter, or are working on your own healing journey. Now is a good point to mention that I am not a mental health professional and I will not offer medical advice. What I can do is share my own toolkit and be a sounding board.

I know this is all kind of unconventional. But “typical” hasn’t really worked for me, and I have a hunch that it might not be working for you either.

If you’re tired of the same ol’, same ol’ and are craving a space that celebrates your individuality, creativity, and desire for something more meaningful in your work, I’d love to invite you to join me. You might start by checking out some of the "new ways to web" that I'm working on.

Let’s explore these uncharted paths together.