New Year… Who Dis???

Good bye 2023! Hello 2024! We made it… by the skin of our teeth… we made it. How are y’all doing? The 20’s have been a wild ride, no?

So if I were to use one word to describe 2023, what word would it be? ADVENTURE! Adventure is what I would have to describe 2023 as. I could also use as a close second: QUEST. 2023 was a quest to find and try to avoid the fault lines. There were so many things happening. Starting off 2023 was going well. I was so hopeful. In my personal life I began dancing and had my first paid performance with HHOH a local Chicago Dance Company as a Company member. I got to host a wonderful event for Black History Month with a beautifully diverse law firm downtown. I was interviewed for Foodie Friday with Jamaica Ponder on Local Chicago CBS News. I made and created some incredible desserts while doing pop ups, hosting workshops at Navy Pier, and students in the bakery. In June I had to close my doors and pack up all my equipment. A major pivot happened with an incredible photo shoot with Breionna Myles Photography, and a total rebrand lead by The Rooted Creative. July was awesome as I led a workshop with the executive team of Neilsen-Massey Vanilla Company, catered a wedding, and began collaborating with a new coffee shop in Park Forest that officially opened in September. The end of the year was filled with more pop ups such as Slo ‘Mo, Queen’s Chicago, a Luxury Lesbian Lounge, Reformed School, Nobody’s Darling, the Semicolon’s Bookstore Lit Fest, and more. The end of the year was a whirlwind, and finally 2023 came to a roaring end. I have whiplash.

The highs were just as great as the lows I would say. Of course there were so many other unmentioned great opportunities and connections but man, the failures, the mis-steps, the learning process of discernment to recognize when to set down Delulu and admit it’s time to let it go… it hurt. A lot. Figuring out how I want my voice and identity to show up in this quickly changing complex world filled with a lot of injustice, loss, grief, inequity, pain, and strife is exhausting. Trying to figure out how I do not add to the problems while seeking to take up space and make a difference has been overwhelming. I’m no stranger to working hard, working long hours, multiple jobs, with no days off, but recognizing when I was doing all of that and it isn’t actually helping my business grow felt insufferable. I recognized I needed to stop. Set it down. And I did. Unit 2A3 in 2018 started out as my first job at a cake shop (Luxury Cake Company with the amazing Chef Laura Mitchell) and in 2022 became the home of Cookies & Conversations. It was incredible. I let that chapter end.

And guess what the world didn’t end. I didn’t fall apart nor did Cookies & Conversations cease to exist. We evolved. I kept going, very slowly. Throughout 2023 I was blessed to meet and work with an incredible array of people, of foodies, of entrepreneurs, and many more. I was able to be inspired again when I stoped running in circles. I took the second half of the year to began the really big reset of understanding what and who I wanted to be in business. What is the life I wanted to create? Like yes be hungry and work hard, but let’s not do that thing where I am filling life with busy work that expends a ton of energy and doesn’t effectively allow a review of where we are at. How do I measure my success other than a balance sheet? I recognized what I had been doing with my physical location was not sustainable nor an effective way for me to show up in this space blending the pastries and the people. I wasn’t working the right parts in the ways that made sense for growth, personal, financial, and business. I have been taking a lot of time to understand what values I can take out of the standard model of economics, and blend it with my personal values because I need to it to fit me. I don’t want to live a life I have to take a vacation from. I want to build out not only the cookies with my retail online business but also host events and create programming. I got a wiff of that with my physical location, but a much better streamlined and nuanced plan has to be pursued. I’m part conversationalist, education advocate, and a pastry chef and hadn’t fully shined in any of those roles because I lacked a lot of clarity, discernment, and execution. Failure, mistakes, things going awry. They are mine. They are a part of my story. And they are expensive, yet it’s not over. I may be at the beginning once again yet I have all that knowledge and I am wiser! I have lived through those experiences and have not given up! At the end of the day, creating this brand is a way for me to create the world I want to see, the one that holds space for my Blackness, my Woman-ess, my Queerness, my HUMANITY. That means I’ve got the chance to do something different.

So now I leave you with some of the questions I’ve been ruminating on. What kind of world does your business thrive in? What does it mean to fight for what you believe in? Does that fight change when others do not understand you? Does it change how or if you fight if they are invested in you? What does it mean to take the less than traditional paths to get to your end goal? What does it mean to be creative? How do you work and hustle while still making time for proper rest? What do you have to say no to? What comforts are you willing to give up to get your business going? How do you define success? How big do you want your business to be? How important is doing the thing you love (baking) in terms of how big you grow? What kind of life do you want to live and lead? Are you wanting to be an industry giant or reside in a niche? What is the cost of delegation? These are a few of the questions that have run at different times and at different capacities within my brain space.

Life really does continuously offer us different choices all the time. It really is up to us to to navigate those choices and even at times evaluate the criteria that we measure those choices by. I really feel so glad to be able to continuously evolve and make space and time to learn and grow in the midst of challenges. Welcome to 2024!