I launched the blueprints last week. Did the thing, showed up, said the words, sent the emails. And then my body went: we’re done here.
I’ve been sleeping more than normal for over a week. My creative urge has been offline for just as long. And I’ve been doing that thing where I tell myself I’m resting, when really I’m hiding. The “rest” that’s actually hiding feels different in the body. Nothing restores. I know this. And yet…
Here’s my pattern, the one I’m actively working to break.
I create something. I get genuinely excited about it. I can already see where it’s going, what it’s becoming, the version of it that exists two iterations from now. And then I move on to building that next thing before I’ve told a single person the first thing exists.
There’s a scene in the Grinch where he says: “5:00, solve world hunger, tell no one.”
That is me. That has always been me. I blame it on my 1 Line in Human Design. This is the line of the researcher so nothing is ever actually “done” (which is also the line that makes me an expert in so many things so I guess it balances out?)
So this time I did the launch. Intentionally. Anchored into it as a practice, because I know I’m good at making things and still practicing the part where I actually let people know the things exist. And it felt good. I showed up. I said the thing. I meant it.
The blueprints I launched are something I’m genuinely proud of. I’m already watching them change how founders see their businesses, watching people move faster and more clearly than they were a week ago. The offer is real. The impact is real. I wanted to honor that by launching it like it mattered.
It cost me more than I expected.
The launch itself was a reasonable amount of work. I paced it well. But my body had a different read on what just happened.
More visibility. More exposure. More people seeing me at a size that’s bigger than my usual baseline. And somewhere underneath the logistics of it, my nervous system registered that as: we are out in the open, and we require more information before we feel okay about this.
I’ve been working on the visibility piece for a while. The part where being seen at a certain scale triggers something protective in the body that has nothing to do with whether the work is good or whether you’re ready. My body isn’t wrong to flag it. It’s doing its job. It’s just that the job it’s doing is protecting a version of me that has already outgrown that level of protection.
So I’ve been sleeping. A lot. My creative energy has been quiet. And I’ve been calling it rest, which is at least partially true, while also knowing there’s a hiding component I’m naming out loud right now.
I've also been carrying guilt about it.
The astro posts I skipped this month. The things I wanted to deliver sooner. The quiet voice that says people noticed, drew conclusions, felt let down.
That fear of letting people down is its own kind of weight. And I’ve been lugging it around on top of an already depleted body, which, as it turns out, is not a great recovery strategy.
Last night I did some somatic work with a ritual from Sam Schmuck’s VIBE Immersion. In one of the homework videos, she said something that stopped me.
A feeling only lasts 90 seconds. What we make of it lasts so much longer.
Ninety seconds. The actual feeling, in the body, without the story layered on top of it, is ninety seconds. Everything after that is the narrative I’m building around it. The meaning I’m making. The conclusions I’m drawing about what it says about me, my business, my readiness, my worth.
I’ve been at war with my body all week when I could have been in conversation with her. The feeling itself was never the problem. The story I kept writing about what the feeling meant, that’s where the week went.
So I vibed through it. Literally sat with the feeling, let it move, and came out the other side in under two minutes.
And I felt better.
I'm still tender. I'm still tired.
The blueprints are still out there. The people who received them are still moving. The work kept going while my creative urge went quiet for a week.
And I’m still here. Still working on the gap between what my brain wants to build and what my body is ready to hold. A little more honest than I planned to be on a Wednesday. But here.
But I'm not giving up on that relationship. The body-brain conversation is the work. It's the same work I help founders do inside their businesses, the friction between how they're wired and how they've been trying to operate. I'm just doing it in real time, out loud, with you.
If you’ve launched something recently and then gone completely quiet, I see you. The hangover is real. You’re whole and the momentum held.
Your body is just catching up to the size of what you did.
One more thing before you go.
I’ve been sitting on something for a little while. Over the years I’ve done a lot of work on visibility, and I mean a lot. The kind of work that lives in the body, the nervous system, the stories we inherited about what happens when people actually see us.
I’m thinking about turning that into a mini series here. The full picture of what I’ve explored, what moved the needle, and what didn’t.
Curious if that’s something you’d want to read or listen to.
Would you read a mini series on visibility work?
Katie MacLachlan is the founder of Be Good Guide™ and the creator of the Unbothered Business Blueprint™ → an operating manual for founders who are done building businesses that fit everyone except themselves.