What having a near-death experience taught me about B2B sales

I want to preface the following with:

This is not my regular fashion content, not even close. In fact, I never imagined I would ever be writing something like this, and it’s not necessarily for you to read, but rather, a way for me to try to wrap my head around what happened and how I feel about it.

I’ve always considered anyone who reads my Substack to be in my little, inner circle of friends, and that’s why I chose to post this here. Anywho…

Let’s start with a little game. What is your initial reaction upon seeing the following photo?

I bet every dollar to my name (which, granted, is not much) that it’s not “that looks like some harmless dude who probably has the wrong house, and that thing on his hip is just for protection”.

No no, your mind, and that of every other sane person reading this goes right to the absolute worst possible scenario.

Just as mine did when I was woken up by my dog going absolutely ballistic at the wee hours of the morning when it was still very much dark out. Normally, I would ignore her barking at that time because it usually signals an overnight delivery driver. Which I would have done at this time as well, had it not been accompanied by an alert on my phone that my cameras picked up someone in my backyard.

My backyard that is not accessible from the front of the house. Intentionally, because life with a pig means he will try to find any means of escaping.

Now imagine the sheer wave of terror that washed over me when I pulled up the footage to be faced with this image, accompanied by my husband’s yells to “call 911, someone is in the house” as he heard footsteps in our living room.

I don’t know how to put into words how the next few moments unfolded. My husband running to slam and lock our bedroom door. Shoving me, the animals and himself into our bathroom as I silently passed him the phone with 911 already on the line. To then hear him say “someone is in my house and I think they are armed” followed by reciting our address.

Which to my great dismay and my husbands horror was accompanied by me passing out on our bathroom floor, my body seemingly refusing to cooperate due to my absolute terror. Terror, the likes of which I have never felt in my life, and could not even ever fathom feeling.

Especially in my own home. My little house in the woods, a place that has ever only brought feelings of comfort and safety.

We know all our neighbors!

We have neighborhood bonfires!

We water each others plants and feed each others chickens when someone goes on vacation!

We barely even lock our doors!

We don’t even have our own police department because of how tiny this town is and NOTHING. EVER. HAPPENS.

But yet my brain immediately went through every worst case scenario possible. What if I had been alone? Not entirely out of the realm of possibility because my husband travels quite a bit for work. What if we had a baby in the house? Seeing as the big C(hildren) conversation is one we are now having quite often. What if we actually were, truly, about to die?

Now important detail to be known here, this was, IN FACT, some dude who had the wrong house and that thing on his hip was just for “protection”.

But it would take us and the police another 30 minutes to get that knowledge.

At this point of the story, my husband is silently waiting with dispatch on the line until the cops show up. I am unconscious. Props to him for keeping it together.

Another side note here. I am Canadian. I have only lived in the States for a measly few years. I have never seen a loaded firearm up close, and the closest I have ever come to a real life gun was my husband showing me the tiny, locked up .380 he bought during COVID in case of…..apparently zombies.

The locked up gun that is now collecting dust in our basement crawl space that we never need to access.

A gun that this situation has shown us we need to get rid of, and further reinforced that we are not gun people. That no one needs to be gun people.

Now your knee jerk reaction may be “well if you had the gun accessible to you, you would have felt safer, because you could’ve used it for protection”. To which I say:

ABSO-FUCKING-LUTELY NOT.

Because this, my friends, turned out to be a contractor who was hired to do plumbing work on my neighbor’s fire-damaged, empty house.

He jumped the fence of what he thought was an empty house. He was looking for a spare key in the grill of an empty house. He walked through the patio door of what he thought was an empty house.

Yes, this guy acted like a dumbass, and I don’t know how the cars in the driveway, or the barking dog did not tip him off that something wasn’t right.

Now imagine what could have happened had my husband walked out into our living room with a gun.

That contractor, who was expecting an empty house and instead was faced with what he would have perceived as a threat, would have drawn his “protection” weapon… and I can only speculate what would’ve occured in the subsequent moments.

So I am glad the gun wasn’t reachable. I am glad my husband wasn’t stupid enough to walk into the living room with it, and I am glad the police department arrived when they had to apprehend this guy and figure out what the actual fuck was going on.

And I am glad no gunshots were fired that morning.

What I am not glad about is the fact that I will never truly feel competely safe in my own house again. A place I considered my sanctuary.

Because of the fucking gun.

P.S. before you say “but you would’ve been scared to see a man in your backyard whether he had a gun or not”. Yes, you are correct. But I would have assumed he was here to rob us and the course of action would have been something like “take whatever you want and leave”. A scary situation, but not one I would immediately assume would end in my murder. The gun automatically made me think that we are not walking away from this alive. Yes, it’s the fucking guns.