Welcome to CherryCoBiz, a space created with the best intentions for mind, body, and spirit.

Today’s writing prompt asks a pretty simple question:

How do you write what people actually want to read?

Truth.

At least, that has always been my answer.

Not necessarily the answer people want to hear. Not always the answer they expect. But the truth is, that seems to be what people enjoy reading most here on CherryCoBiz.

My views on life may differ from yours. My experiences certainly will. And that is okay. I am living my truth, and you are living yours.

In a world filled with misdirection, deception, carefully curated lives, half-truths, algorithms, advertisements, and people trying to convince us of one thing or another, I think there is something comforting about stumbling across another human being who simply says:

Here is where I am today.

Of course, some truths are harder to share than others.

And today is one of those days.

Well, Friends… It’s Been a Minute

It has been a minute since I have truly had the time and mental space to do what I believe much of my life’s work is geared toward: building what I started right here at CherryCoBiz.

If you have been around for a while, you have watched this little corner of the internet evolve in all kinds of directions.

We have talked about holistic health and wellness, V-Trucker, Avon, QuietQuest, Reverb, Civicus, favorite YouTube finds, recipes, personal growth, life lessons, and whatever else has wandered through my curious little brain.

You have also probably noticed that my poor precious website has been a little chaotic for the past several months.

I hired someone through Fiverr to help me straighten some things out. Some great changes happened during our first round of work, and I happily left positive feedback. Unfortunately, the second attempt never really reached the finish line as the project evolved.

It happens.

And now I think I may have found a completely different avenue to explore with CherryCoBiz—one that could actually be a lot of fun.

Conveniently, I suddenly have some time.

Why?

I got fired this morning.

There it is.

No candy coating. No carefully constructed announcement about “exploring exciting new opportunities.”

I was let go.

And That Sucks. Obviously.

The strange part is that I had dedicated almost my entire world to this job for the past couple of months.

I was learning an entirely new industry, new systems, new people, new expectations and, at the same time, helping develop processes inside systems I had barely finished learning myself.

It felt like jumping through hoops of fire some days.

Residents yelled. Residents cried. People begged for another day. Neighbors fought with neighbors. Vendors needed answers. Owners needed answers. Maintenance emergencies happened. Phones rang. Emails multiplied.

And somewhere in the middle of all of that, I became incredibly invested in being good at it.

I worked days, nights, and weekends.

And I was good at many parts of it.

I received compliments from coworkers and leadership. I was given additional responsibilities. We even developed a bonus structure around some of the work I was doing.

So when I walked into that conference room this morning, I didn’t realize I was about to get the boot.

But as the conversation unfolded and shifted toward the idea that perhaps I wasn’t the right match for the company, something interesting happened.

I agreed.

Maybe not for all the same reasons.

But I agreed.

The Goldilocks of Jobs

Remember the law office?

I knew within about two weeks that I hated that job.

Not the people. I genuinely liked the people I worked with.

It was the pace.

It was too slow.

I wanted something to do. I wanted to be challenged. I wanted to be busy.

Well…

Be careful what you wish for, Cherry.

Because then I found property management.

And suddenly I wasn’t looking for things to do anymore.

Things were looking for me.

Constantly.

The work orders were constant, and the emergencies were very real. There were moments when parts of the position reminded me of emergency air dispatch work I had done years ago. Something was always happening, someone needed something, and there was almost always another problem waiting behind the one you were solving.

No joke, there was always something to do.

I hardly took lunches. I just worked.

I paid bills. I sifted through invoices and tried to match everything to the appropriate work orders. I bounced between owner calls, resident calls, vendor calls, emails, maintenance issues, approvals, invoices, follow-ups, and communication between all of those people at one point or another.

And that doesn’t even begin to cover it.

There was so much more.

So, so much more.

I wanted to achieve every requirement placed in front of me, and I did my best to make that happen.

The funny thing is, just over a month ago, I had already started wondering whether this was actually a good match for me.

I remember wanting to sit down and write something for CherryCoBiz.

I couldn’t.

There was too much to do.

I wanted to finish something for one of my coworkers first. There was always one more thing I could get done. One more problem I could solve. One more task I could finish.

And I could never quite focus back on my world because that world demanded everything I had left to give.

That realization stayed with me.

So maybe I have been living through some strange, middle-aged Goldilocks experiment.

The law office was too cold.

Property management may have been too hot.

And somewhere out there is my “just right.”

Or maybe “just right” isn’t another job at all.

Maybe it is finally learning that a job can support the life I am building without becoming the life I am building.

There is a difference.

And sincerely, I wish the next person who steps into that position all the luck in the world.

Learning Something Is Not the Same as Being Shown Something

I’ve spent today thinking about what happened, because of course I have.

I think expectations and reality didn’t always meet—for either party.

One of the biggest challenges was something I think happens in workplaces more often than people admit:

Being shown something is not the same as being trained to do it.

There were specific things inside our systems that had been shown to me once or twice. I had seen them done. Maybe I had even done them alongside someone.

But seeing something once or twice doesn’t automatically create understanding.

Training takes repetition. It takes context. It takes being able to make a mistake, ask why it happened, correct it, and then do the process again until the pieces connect.

And there was another layer to this position.

Imagine starting a job and still learning how to process the basic functions inside a system while simultaneously being expected to think about how complex workflows within that system should be built, changed, automated, or improved.

Those are two very different levels of understanding.

Before I can intelligently redesign a process, I need enough experience with that process to understand why it works the way it does in the first place.

That takes time.

I don’t believe all of the expectations placed on the position accounted for that learning curve, and I struggled at times to understand exactly what success was supposed to look like because some expectations weren’t clearly defined.

At the same time, I was receiving some genuinely great feedback.

That’s part of why today surprised me.

And yes, because this is a piece about truth, I have thought about the moments when I pushed back.

There were a couple of times when I stood my ground. There were times when I disagreed. There were times when I felt assumptions were being made about my work that I didn’t believe were accurate, and I defended myself.

I don’t know exactly what role those moments played in today’s decision.

But I would be lying if I said I hadn’t wondered.

What I do know is that I wasn’t willing to let the integrity of my work be defined by the idea that because someone else might have approached something differently, my effort or intention somehow wasn’t there.

I worked incredibly hard.

I know that.

I also know I made mistakes.

Those truths can exist together.

And somewhere in trying to meet every expectation, learn every system, prove that I could do the work, fix what needed fixing, and keep everything moving, another realization was unfolding.

While I was learning how to become everything this position needed me to be, I was slowly disappearing from the rest of my own life.

Somewhere Along the Way, I Disappeared From My Own Schedule

This may be the biggest truth of all.

While I was working so hard to become what that position needed me to be, pieces of my own life quietly started falling off the calendar.

I wasn’t walking like I had been.

Water aerobics disappeared.

My water intake suffered.

My wellness routines became inconsistent.

CherryCoBiz sat waiting.

My writing sat waiting.

My book—which is sitting there practically saying, Hello? Remember me?—sat waiting.

The children’s books I want to write sat waiting.

And somewhere along the way, I realized I didn’t have enough mental capacity left at the end of the day to worry about the things that had mattered enormously to me before I started that job.

That is not sustainable for me.

I have my own dreams.

I Am a Writer at Heart

I’ve done a ridiculous variety of things throughout my life. Seriously, if you’ve read The Lawyer, The Nurse, The Soldier: How My Almosts Became My Purpose, you already know my professional history does not exactly follow a straight line.

But writing has followed me through all of it.

And I think I understand a little better now why it keeps calling me back.

I believe I have something to offer the world.

That doesn’t mean I think I have all the answers. Good Lord, spend five minutes around here and you’ll figure that one out.

What I mean is that when someone gives me a few minutes of their life to read something I have written, I hope they walk away with something of value.

Maybe they learn something.

Maybe they question something.

Maybe they cook something.

Maybe they laugh.

Maybe they recognize themselves in a story.

Maybe they simply feel a little more human because somebody else admitted that life can be an absolute mess sometimes.

I have worked through and lived through experiences that have shaped how I look outward at the world.

There are forms of care I simply cannot give anymore.

I don’t do elder care or hospice work anymore. I can’t do that work anymore.

But the care that made me good at it didn’t disappear when I stopped doing the job.

I can bring that care here.

To my little corner of the internet.

I can bring curiosity here. Compassion. Research. Experience. Humor. Food. Wellness. Mistakes. Growth.

And love.

Love to live and live to love.

That has been my motto for a very long time.

Writing gives me a place to practice it.

I love the time involved.

I love research.

I love chasing an idea down a rabbit hole and discovering something I didn’t know when I started.

I love taking something complicated and finding the human story buried inside it.

I already have a book waiting to be published.

I want to write children’s books, too. One idea particularly close to my heart is teaching children the sliver concept—the idea that every person sees only a sliver of another person’s life and experience.

Imagine learning that young.

Imagine understanding from childhood that what we see of another human being is never their entire story.

There is work here that I care deeply about.

And for the first time in a couple of months, I have room to hear it calling again.

So, Does Getting Fired Suck Ass?

Absolutely.

Come on.

There is no need to spiritually bypass the obvious.

It doesn’t feel good to be told someone no longer wants you working for them. It creates uncertainty. It creates financial questions. It makes you replay conversations and wonder what you could have done differently.

That’s human.

But something else happened today too.

A weight lifted.

And yes, another kind of weight immediately took its place. Bills don’t disappear because you’ve had a profound moment of personal clarity.

But I reclaimed something today that I didn’t realize I had surrendered so completely.

My time.

My health.

My wellness.

My writing.

My projects.

My family.

My evenings.

My weekends.

My brain.

And CherryCoBiz.

I will entertain another position. Of course I will.

But I know something now that I didn’t know quite as clearly a few months ago.

I don’t want to work my life away building someone else’s dream while mine gathers dust.

Whatever comes next, I want to be able to go home at the end of the day and actually be home.

I want work to have an ending.

I want to walk again.

I want to get back in the water.

I want to cook something low and slow and ridiculously delicious without mentally answering emails while I chop the onions.

I want to write.

Which Brings Us Back to the Question

How do you write what people actually want to read?

I don’t think you start by asking what people want.

I think you start by telling the truth.

Not every truth belongs on the internet. Privacy matters. Boundaries matter. Other people’s stories are not automatically ours to tell simply because they intersect with our own.

But the truth that is ours?

There is power in telling it.

Today, my truth is that I got fired.

It sucks.

I learned a lot.

I worked my ass off.

I met people I genuinely liked.

I discovered some things I am very good at.

I discovered some things I never want to do again.

I probably made mistakes.

They probably did too.

And life continues.

Perhaps the most important truth is that I don’t feel defeated.

I feel… redirected.

So welcome back, longtime CherryCoBiz Friends.

And if somehow this is the first thing you’ve ever read here, welcome to the chaos.

This is CherryCoBiz.

This is where holistic health and wellness meet real life.

Where we cook.

Where we learn.

Where we research.

Where we question.

Where we evolve.

Where sometimes we get knocked completely off course on a Thursday morning.

And then we figure out what we’re going to do with Friday.

This is where we meet life with great intention.

And Friends…

I think we’re about to have a lot more to talk about.