Here is how you know you have run a small business: you can tell me, to the dollar, what it costs to print a hoodie, ship it to Boise, and have the person in Boise decide it runs a little small.
For a couple of years my husband Matt and I ran EverProud + Collective, a queer-owned apparel brand out of Kitsap County. Fog on the front, pride on the inside, made to order, forty dollars a shirt. We sold some. Not enough. Forty dollars is a real number when eggs cost what eggs cost, and I have a day job that measures success by whether the first day of school passes without anyone needing to call me. There are only so many hours. Most of mine were already spoken for.
So the store is closed. I want to say that plainly. I’ve read too many “exciting new chapter” announcements that took four paragraphs to admit somebody lost.
There was no dramatic ending. No viral moment. I posted every day for a long time and social media did what social media does, which is churn. Numbers went up, numbers went down, and none of it seemed connected to anything I actually did. I learned to read a dashboard. I learned what a size chart is and why it matters more than you think. I learned that a good product with no way to reach people is a well-kept secret, and that the reach was always the hard part, not the making.
I also learned which part I’d miss.
It wasn’t the shirts. The shirts were fine. It was the writing. The posts about fog and ferries and the particular grey of a November morning, the ones I wrote at eleven at night when I should have been asleep. Those were the thing. The store was a reason to write them. It turns out I don’t need the reason.
So I’m keeping the words. All of them, and a few I’d scattered elsewhere.
This is Echoes from the Break. Everything goes here now, and while I was moving in I gathered up the rest of what I’d been writing and put it on three shelves.
EverProud is the archive. Every post from the old blog, dated as it was written, with the shop links taken out. The Pacific Northwest pieces. The quiet kind of pride. The Tuesday kind. Reading back through them was strange. A person building something, sure it would work. I don’t disown any of it. It was true then. It’s still true.
The Long Way Around is the travel. The daily notes Matt and I write from wherever we’ve ended up, which used to live on Facebook and disappear into the scroll. Sixteen days in Japan. A week in Washington, DC. New Year’s in Banff, mostly narrated by the dog. Those are here now, whole, with the photos.
Stay in the Room is the town, and the country. Schools, levies, the slow work of keeping a community from coming apart. It includes the thirty days I wrote leading up to the Fourth of July, gathered by week. That one is the argument of the whole place: not the grand gesture, the staying in the room.
A few practical things. This is free and will stay free. If you want to pledge, that tells me something landed, and I’ll be glad of it, but nobody is getting a paywall. I don’t post on a schedule. I post when there’s something to say. And everything here is mine alone. Not my employer’s. Not any board’s.
One more thing.
We spend a lot of energy grieving the versions of ourselves that didn’t work out. The business. The plan. The thing we announced and had to walk back. But the store was a container. It held the writing for a while. Containers are allowed to be temporary. The thing inside isn’t.
If you’re carrying something that stopped fitting its container, set the container down. Keep the thing.
The store is closed. The light is still on.
Stay soft. Stay grounded.
— Patrick