Glow by Lady E

  Dear Glow Girls, It’s been a while since the last issue.  Right now, as I write this, it’s 12:24 am and I just finished decorating 17 notebooks and fulfilling another big order.  I posted 16 notebooks yesterday and one regular client bought them all.  There goes my inventory.  But I’m very grateful. In fact, thank you. More please.  And Lady Flo also arrived. So, yeah.  I’m sure you can imagine how that’s going for me.  I was swamped with orders one after another at the atelier. There was no breathing room.  And then I was commissioned to work on a book project that will last 18 months. So that’s an ongoing thing.  And now, I’m preparing for a bazaar and of course, Christmas! As I wrote this issue, I was also experiencing and choosing gentle healing  in many areas of my life. You’ve read about some of them in this issue.  For many years, I thought of healing as only physical health. But now I am profoundly aware of not only m...

Hi, Glow Girls!  This issue will be a little different. Instead of arriving all at once, I’ll be sharing it with you over the next two weeks, a few pieces at a time. There’s a reason for the change, and I’ll tell you more when we get to From the EIC’s Desk . For now, three stories are waiting for you Monday night. Issue 04: Gentle Healing starts tonight.  —- With elegance and quiet fire, Lady E Founder, Glow by Lady E An editorial space for stories, art, and intentional living

  I don’t announce my boundaries anymore. I don’t explain them. Don’t justify them. Don’t soften them so they land better. I just… move. Quietly. Consistently. Without asking if it makes sense to anyone else. Because I’m done.  Done with all that negativity and toxicity that some people keep throwing at me.  It didn’t happen all at once. There was no moment where I decided that’s it, I’m done. It was slower than that. Quieter. Like noticing how much of myself I kept offering just to be understood. It was an accumulation of events from the past year to the present.  An accumulation of feelings and neglect and disrespect.  Access used to feel like something I had to give. Freely. Openly. Without hesitation. My time. My energy. My thoughts. Always available. Always explainable. Always… reachable. Always ready to give, to do, to become.  Always ready to move. To stop what I’m doing. To please.  Until I noticed something. The ...

  I don’t remember exactly when it happened. There wasn’t a moment. No decision I sat down and made. It just… slipped away. The need to explain. It used to come so naturally. Filling in the gaps. Clarifying what I meant. Making sure I wasn’t misunderstood. I kept doing this over and over.  Second guessing. Checking that what I said didn’t translate the wrong way with the other person.  Not because I was unsure of myself. But because I thought that’s what you do when you care about being understood. So I would explain. Gently. Patiently. Sometimes even before I was asked. Just to make things easier. But somewhere along the way… I noticed something. The people who really wanted to understand me… never needed that much explaining. And the ones who didn’t? No amount of explaining ever seemed to reach them. Or they just didn’t care.  So I started pausing. Not intentionally at first. Just… noticing the space between what I felt and what I was about to say. And s...