What carrying this work alone actually costs you

There’s a kind of loneliness that comes with the art of pleasure, and it’s especially lonely when you build a business around it..

It’s not the loneliness that most Entrepreneurs deal with when working from home, or being your own boss..

This is a different kind of loneliness.. the loneliness that comes from the art of pleasure, and an art that you are genuinely proud of, yet, you are not able to tell most of the people in your life about it..

I experienced this loneliness early in my adult career.. 5 years after I started this work, I also got my real estate license.. I studied my ass off and passed the exam in record time.. I was working both industries at once, because I was not yet 100% committed to sexwork, the way I am now. I did both for about a year before I was told I couldn’t..

so I had to choose..

I chose adult.. and this decision was made partly because I had the support of my partner, my now husband, and my mom.. you see, the choice itself was not the hard part..

The hard part was the quiet acceptance that there were rooms I wouldn’t be allowed into, conversations I couldn’t have openly, parts of my life, my art, I would need to keep separate from the rest..

The stigma of this work doesn’t just affect how the world sees you.. it affects how you move through the world.. it affects which parts of yourself you let people see and which parts you carry alone, in secrecy.

External validation was a huge part of my identity for a long time.. I needed people to see me as successful, credible, and as someone worth taking seriously..

my art made certain people look at me differently the moment they found out about it.. not with curiosity, but with judgment.. and I was supposed to just fkn carry that, and keep showing up anyway.

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and to make matters worse, I was also making expensive mistakes that nobody warned me about either..

the one that cost me the most was taxes..

In those early years, I had no clue that the $$ hitting my account was not the number that was mine to keep.. by the time I understood that, I owed thousands of dollars that I did not have. It took me years to pay it off.. . years of carrying that debt as a background stressor causing me a shit ton of anxiety..

I’m telling you this because I want you to understand what building alone actually costs.. it’s not just time or external shame.. it’s money you didn’t know you were losing, and mistakes you did not know you were making.. it is years you could’ve built differently, if one person (with real industry experience) had looked at your situation and said, “do this differently”..

I genuinely believe that if I had the information earlier, the information I have now, I could have done in a quarter of the time what took me almost 15 years..

That realization sat with me for a long time, and eventually it stopped feeling like a “personal regret” and started feeling like a problem worth solving.. not just for me, but for every creator doing what I did, figuring it all out alone in the dark, paying for lessons that nobody warned them were coming..

because we cannot call up a family member to talk platform strategy, or join a local chamber of commerce.... in reality, most mastermind groups do not want us in the room..

early this year, I stopped waiting for someone else to build it..

I’d been thinking about this problem for over 2 years, thinking about how to create something that went deep enough to actually help, something that held the specific context and trust that real business conversations require.. something that did not ask adult creators to hide their art in order to be welcomed in the room.

At some point the thinking had to become the building.. so I built it..

It is called The Boardroom and it is a weekly live call for adult creators who are serious about building a real business.. it’s not a course, a content library, nor a 1-1 coaching program. Instead, it is a live (virtual) room, where your business is the focus, where you are held accountable to what you said you were going to test that week, and where every result from every member becomes something the whole room learns from.

I want to tell you what happened in the early weeks..

When I saw those posts go up, I felt like a proud mom…mind you, I don’t have kids, but I imagine it felt something like that.. like watching someone finally step into their power, and realizing that I was part of that empowerment..

I am sharing all of this not to sell you something, but because I spent too many years not knowing that a room like this could exist for people like us..

If you have been building alone, carrying mistakes you did not know you were making, repeating the same weeks and wondering why nothing changes, I want you to know that the room exists now.

And if you are not ready for that yet, I want you to know that the art you are creating matters, even when you cannot tell most people in your life about it.. even when the stigma makes you carry it alone.. even when the tax bill arrives and you don’t know how you are going to handle it.

Still in this industry, taxes paid this time,

MelRose

P.S. The Boardroom is not for everyone and I mean that genuinely, if you are brand new and still learning the basics, CEO Society is where I would point you first and it is completely free. But if you have been at this for a while and you are ready to stop operating alone, you can apply for The Boardroom here