Look What We Built Anyway...

Four years, a little spite, a lot of learning, and more WTF moments than I can count...

On August 29, the store turns four years old... Four... Years...

I would love to tell you this whole thing started with a perfectly organized business plan, an inspirational vision board, and one of those beautiful “I always knew this was exactly what I was meant to build” stories. It didn't...

There may have been a little spite involved.... Okay... Maybe more than a little...

But sometimes motivation arrives wearing very strange clothes, and here's the thing about building something: what gets you started isn't necessarily what keeps you going. I definitely couldn't have predicted what the next four years were going to bring. We've met some absolutely incredible people. We've had customers become regulars, regulars become friends, people walk through our doors genuinely wanting to learn, and others simply looking for a place where they could ask questions without feeling judged.

We've taught. We've learned. We've laughed. We've made mistakes. We've changed things approximately 972 times... Maybe 973 soon... Ok maybe more changes than Barb could handle!

We've dealt with some rude people, some very interesting people, and some people who made Barb and me look at each other like two deer caught in headlights thinking:

What. The actual. Hell!!

Because running a metaphysical store means you really never know what someone is going to ask for.

There was the regular customer who, in the middle of a completely normal conversation with MaryLynn and me, casually asked if we carried elephant milk. Naturally, the two moms in the room assumed he meant actual milk... from an actual female elephant. We didn't carry it, obviously, but after he left, curiosity took over and there we were Googling elephant milk... Whether humans could drink it, why someone would want it, and learning far more about elephant breast milk than either of us ever needed to know. Well, sometime later Barb saw him and finally asked what kind of “elephant milk” he had been looking for. Turns out, MaryLynn and I had been researching the wrong end of the elephant. He was talking about the male version of “milk,” which he believed would help increase his testosterone. To this day, I don't know what's funnier: the original request or the fact that two grown women genuinely walked away with newly acquired knowledge about elephant breast milk because we were just trying to provide good customer service.

Four years later, I've learned one very important lesson:

Sometimes you really, REALLY need to ask a follow-up question!

Then there was the gentleman who called the store specifically to curse us. The store, everyone involved, the whole shebang. Unfortunately for him, my mom answered the phone. She laughed at him and hung up. Which apparently offended him enough that he called back, this time announcing that he was going to curse her. At this point, I was already laughing in the background while my mom—completely unimpressed—basically told him to go right ahead because we've dealt with worse, called him out on his nonsense, laughed again, and hung up. Sir, you called a metaphysical store to threaten the women inside with a curse. You may have miscalculated your audience.

Let me say something... those weren't even the strangest calls!!

We've had a gentleman call because something rather alarming was happening to his... male equipment. There are moments when owning a metaphysical store requires spiritual knowledge, compassion, and experience—and there are other moments when all you can think is: Sir, I don't believe a candle is going to fix this!

And don't even get me started on astrology... I love astrology, but every once in a while someone comes in and gives us their Sun, Moon, Rising, houses, planetary placements, retrogrades, aspects, karmic connections, and probably what Mercury had for breakfast that morning—then looks at Barb and me desperately waiting for an answer. Meanwhile, we're standing there like two deer caught in headlights because...

Ma'am, I was just asking if you needed help finding the incense.

And somehow, through all of this...

Look what we built anyway.

That's the part that makes me smile.

Because mixed into all of those ridiculous stories are hundreds of moments that actually matter.

We've watched people walk through our doors wanting to learn something new and leave excited about what they discovered. We've sat with people looking for clarity, watched customers become regulars and regulars become friends, and seen people bring back their friends and families.

We've taught, but we've also been taught. We've laughed until our stomachs hurt. We've had conversations that started with spirituality and ended somewhere completely unrelated.

Somewhere along the way, we created more than a store. We created classes, events, gatherings, friendships, memories, and a community I couldn't have completely imagined four years ago.

And we've learned some hard lessons along the way. Kindness needs boundaries!!

Some ideas work beautifully. Some absolutely do not. Sometimes the best thing you can do is laugh, learn, adjust, and try again. We've learned to listen more, trust ourselves more, and accept that growth doesn't always look the way we imagined it would. Sometimes growth simply means allowing what you've built to grow with you.

That's a big part of what Lil Witch Academy ~ A Metaphysical Store & Learning Center means to me now.

It's not just a new name.

It's four years of experience coming with us into something new.

The good. The ridiculous. The mistakes. The lessons. The people. The elephant milk. The curses. The WTF phone calls. All of it!!

Whatever helped light the match four years ago isn't what kept the doors open.

People did.

The people who genuinely wanted to learn. The customers who kept coming back. The people who trusted us enough to learn from us—and sometimes taught us something along the way. The readers, vendors, friends, family, and community who became part of this strange little world we've created, and maybe a little stubbornness too. The kind that says when something doesn't go according to plan, you don't necessarily give up on the whole thing.

You adjust. You learn. You rebuild. You laugh at the absolute absurdity of it all... And you keep going.

So, with our fourth anniversary just a couple of days away, I don't want to look back and pretend everything was beautiful. It wasn't!!

Some of it was hard. Some of it was hilarious. Some of it taught lessons I probably could've happily lived without learning, and some of it became more beautiful than I ever expected.

But through all of it...

Look what we built anyway.

Four years.

More stories than I could possibly tell.

More lessons than I can count.

Now, a brand-new chapter as Lil Witch Academy. Here's to whatever comes next, and hopefully slightly fewer phone calls about people's private parts, haha!

Although, considering the last four years... I'm not making any promises...

Signing off for this week,

Jazz