the break

As most of you know Sketch Support is taking a break. I thought I would give a little more detail into that. I've spent my life worrying about what people think and trying not to upset anyone. (I spent three years covering up a tattoo because I didn't want to upset my mom. Hello! I'm almost 32!) I'm not really going to worry about that in this post.

Simply put, I'm not a good leader. I avoid confrontation like it's a plague and often times worry a little too much about other's feelings. Until Sketch Support I honestly thought those were great qualities that I was proud to possess. Proud, that is, until I realized that, as selfish as it may seem, if you don't worry about your own feelings, you'll never survive. I take that back. You'll survive but you'll be miserable.

I spent the entire time running a team and worrying constantly about their feelings. Missed deadlines and not making requirements and I could only say "Oh, it's okay..." Then I was frustrated and mad at myself for not standing up and saying, "You know what, it's not okay." I took that frustration and stress and bottled it up. Bottled it up into a 50 pound weight gain, severe depression, and weekly meetings with a therapist.

Don't get me wrong, the Sketch Support team was a fantastic group of women that I, with the exception of a few, very much enjoyed working with. They had talent, were fun, creative, respectable, and understood responsibility. I think so very highly of those girls.

Unfortunately, the girls that I admired and enjoyed where often overshadowed by the disrespectful and deceitful few on the team. You know how they say one bad apple can ruin the bunch. So true! After one particular incident with one team member I was done. Sketch Support was no longer enjoyable for me. What little fun that was left had been sucked out by a person that I had considered a friend. It was heartbreaking and I felt betrayed. In hindsight, I should have known.

Another thing that led to the break (I may need to duck and cover for this...) was the lack of comments. It was beginning to seem that Sketch Support was losing a lot of interest. I felt like I was yelling down a dark hole, "Hellllooooooo? Is anyone there?" I knew that people were visiting the site but I just couldn't understand the lack of comments. I could only assume that it was a lack of interest in the content. It was starting to feel like making the sketches and putting all that time into the postings was a waste. And I carried a lot of stress seeing these wonderful layouts and projects from the team getting very little praise from our readers. I felt like it was my fault since it was my site and my sketches. Again, I bottled it up.

The only interest we could seem to drum up was when we did a giveaway. When I saw that that was the only time we got comments, I stopped doing so many giveaways. I was so frustrated that we only seemed worthy of time when we offered even more free stuff. I know you see this on every blog that does giveaways and I'm not saying we were something special that deserved hundreds of comments on each post. What I am saying though, is that if you enjoy a site it doesn't hurt every now and then to say so. The way I see it is if I stood in our store and handed out free sketches and layout examples to our shoppers, I bet every single one would take the time to say "Thank you." Again, I'm not saying that every single visit to our site should have resulted in a thank you or a comment. I just thought those girls deserved a lot more praise and support than they got.

Maybe I'm just being silly over that part. I don't know. I only know how it made me feel and what kind of thoughts I had on it.

I understand that a lot of people just don't see the comment situation from that perspective. It's sometimes hard to really understand situations until you yourself are in a similar situation. I used to be terrible about visiting blogs and websites and never taking the time to comment. Now that I know what it's like to be on the other side of that, I see it in such a different way.

So the question is, "Is Sketch Support going to return?" As of right now I would say probably not. For one thing, I didn't realize just how much time I was putting into that place until I took a break. I have no idea how I got it all done on top of my home life and my job. Plus, after bottling up all of the worries and stresses and troubles over a year, I was becoming very sick. I imagine it's going to take a lot of time to recover from that and I'm going to take the necessary time to do it.

One thing I do know is that I won't remove Sketch Support. Everything will stay as it is and available to everyone. 

I feel much, much better now that I got that off my chest.  :)