On the ability to take a break

If resilience requires resting to regain energy, when are we even resting?

This post’s a little more personal, a little more touchy-feely, which is why I’m putting it behind the paywall. Lots of thoughts on Substack this time of year about the benefits of a paywall in today’s rife-with-rage online commentary. I’m building a supportive and collaborative, forward-progress-minded and wine-loving community back here, and I hope you’ll consider joining.

For the past year, I’ve been re-training my inner dialogue to build back my own resiliency; attempting to teach myself to be able to feel calm, content, secure, worthy, and joyful. Those five words have been my mantra through 2024, specifically chosen because I realized with a thud of dread some time in 2023 that I lived pretty incessantly in the wholly opposite space.

No wonder I had no resiliency left. All the success that I’d fought for professionally and personally—and had finally begun to tangibly reap the benefits of—were for nought, because I didn’t believe that they were stable or deserved. Whatever I did was never enough and was sure to slip through my fingers by end of day. To be fair, that faulty narrative was brainwashed into me by late capitalism and our productivity-at-all-costs society combined with the hard realities of running brick-and-mortar hospitality businesses. Still, it’s been a year of hard-fought rewiring, and I’m writing this post from (and about!) the throws of an urgent end-of-year push.

In this business—wine retail and hospitality—Q4 is The Big Momma. This is the TIME TO SHINE, BABY: Big sales let’s gooooo! Events should be popping off, and our spaces should be booked solid. Foot traffic should be dramatically increased, and we should be burning through case stacks of full-bodied reds and mid-priced Champagne. Corporate clients should be gifting, and our gift packs should be flying off the shelves. I worked one memorable holiday season at a large Manhattan retailer where my sole job for an eight-hour shift was gift-wrapping hundreds upon hundreds of bottles for massive corporate orders, and I’ve been chasing that gravy train aspiration for my own shops for over a decade. (FWIW, we never got close.)

Before kids, we’d tell our friends and families we’d see them to celebrate the holidays on an alternative date, usually one of the first few days of January. Once our child was of a certain Santa age, though, manipulating his arrival date became much less plausible. Working through the last six weeks of the year meant downplaying Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year’s Eve and their birthday, never mind the sundry parties and festive rituals dotted into the “most wonderful time of the year.” And DON’T get me started on the school district’s week off for Thanksgiving and three-week winter break, all of which deeply inconveniently coincide with wine retail and hospitality’s exact four busiest weeks of the year.

Also deeply inconvenient?!?! Unsurprisingly, our entire household always comes down sick during this exact time of year. What fresh hell.

For years on end, when it seemed as though the rest of the world was “on break,” I did not break—ever!—because I could not break, because if I didn’t push wine sales, make the marketing emails, post the socials, jingle all the way, our businesses would surely crumble. All that I had achieved would slip through my fingers by end of day, all those projections and budgets and hopes and dreams would be blown if the end-of-year sales didn’t add up. So every year, I just kept swimming through 12/31. Then, I’d run inventory on 1/1-1/2, tidy up and take down the decorations around 1/3, re-open 1/4, and bust through all the shit in January that I hadn’t been able to get to in December. By February, I realized there was still no time to rest! We had to market to recoup Dry January’s losses, get some Valentine’s Day events booked, and start planning summer programming and seasonal inventory shifts!

All of this carried on year after year, the ante upped dramatically mid- and post-Pandemic due to rising costs and diminished sales until, frankly, my health—as well as that of our industry—became irreparable. Resiliency = gone.

While the wine and hospitality industries anguished over the possibility that everything we had achieved would slip through our fingers by end of day, that all those projections and budgets and hopes and dreams would be blown if the end-of-year sales didn’t add up… the sales from Q3 2023 through EOY 2024 never added up. From all I read and all the news I heard, my own businesses fared significantly better than our peers these past 18 months. Of that, I am proud. But… there was no denying: Sales were down. Way down. And so I felt (I feel!) terrible, like it was somehow all my fault. I shouldn’t have taken a damn break.

I’d spent 2024 chanting my mantra, meditating hard on whether my businesses’ continued success was worth my deteriorating health, my diminished time with my family, my creeping inability to access joy. I had decided, arduously but at last that it was not. I was on a new path onwards and upwards! Look at this NEW ME! In the past year, I successfully sold one business, delegated day-to-day responsibilities to a management team for another, built back up my writing and consulting client list with parameters that allowed me to work from home and on my own (okay let’s be honest, my kid’s) schedule, and determined that I would “mostly” take off the three weeks of winter break because I deserved to rest and be with my family. GO ME.

And yet… here I am, navel-gazing and mopey (also flu-ridden, right on cue), wringing my hands through the week of in-between-edness—the desperate last sales week of Q4!—and instead of focusing on building up resiliency, I’m hearing all the “shoulds” banging around my brain. I should get a post up. I should reply to that client inquiry. I should schedule inventory. I should vacuum under the bed. I should schedule a dentist appointment. I should file the business license renewal. I should write the wine club notes. I should send an email newsletter with our updated hours. I should send our accountant the reports he asked for. I should blow the goddamn leaves and empty that month-old jar of gravy from the fridge and figure out how to fix the printer and scrub the toothpaste globs out of the sink for Christ’s sake! Oh, I could go on. I look at sales data, and I can’t help but feel a deep sense of shame, those familiar old feelings of anxiety, discontent, insecurity, undeserving-ness and dismay lodged behind my heart and scolding me for not having the wherewithal to be pushing harder, to work a little more, to be better to everyone else except myself.

As I watch several friends shutter their establishments or fold their brands with finality these next few days, I hear them echoing the same misplaced shame and should-haves, guilty and disbelieving that they deserve any rest, believing that they’re to blame for the wine and hospitality industries’ failures to thrive the past few years. Oh late capitalism, you dirty thief!

So. For 2025, I am wondering what it looks like to stop this insanity. I am curious what it will take for me and for our wine and hospitality industries to opt out of these lies. To let ourselves rest at some bloody point and perhaps start to find the energy and clearheadedness to ascertain how to develop real resiliency. This post has no tidy ending; I don’t yet know how to propose any solutions because I’ve not yet allowed myself the time and space and grace to rest. I only know that I will keep my mantra going for 2025, and for now, I will sign off and pull the covers up and let this fever run its course.