Why I stopped honoring a promise made by my past self

I built SexWorkCEO on the promise that I would never gatekeep.

That is the actual reason SWCEO (my baby) exists, and the reason why I spent nearly 5 years giving away free education. Education from lessons that I paid for in failures for over a decade.

I did this because when I started camming back in 2011, I asked successful performers what camera they were using and got told to “figure it out myself”.

I decided then, that fine.. I would figure it out. And when I did I’d tell god damn everybody lol. I didn’t want anyone else to have to feel that way.. to feel alone, unsupported, and disregarded, the way I felt when I asked for guidance.

Here’s the part that never gets acknowledged though. I built that company off of my labor as a sex worker and my income from OnlyFans. Building SWCEO had a huge cost, and it’s one that I paid out of pocket for.

Then I built GPTease.

A product I had put real money and real time into, and one I could not, NOT put a price on. There was no way to bring a resource like that to market off of what was left of my labor on OnlyFans.

And I struggled with this as silly as it sounds, because I had said things were free, and this logistically could not be free.

What I actually struggled with was the anticipation of the backlash I could potentially get from the community for having built something and wanting to charge for it. That had me really scared and concerned, and probably led me to delay launching GPTease a bit.

But in reality, I came to the conclusion that I do believe it’s okay to charge for tools or resources, so long as the creators that buy them make more money as a result of having purchased it. More money than it costs to purchase to begin with.

I was being haunted by something I had once stated, even if there’s no rules obligating me to keep that. The brand I had built held a position on my behalf, and I had somehow decided I was required to keep honoring it forever. Even after I evolved into something entirely new, a technology builder..

That is the trap I did not see coming. You set something down as a principle when you are one version of yourself. Then you grow past that version. And the principle is still there in the back of your mind, weighing in on every decision you make, written by somebody who no longer exists (your past self).

There is a line from the Fallout TV series that made this super clear for me. “Will you still want the same things when you become something else altogether?” This line, when I heard it, sounded like poetry.

It asks about ‘you’ rather than about the ‘plan’. Whether you are still the person that plan was built for.

I’ve shared with you in the past that I can easily get married to plans, ideas, or strategies... I often continue to honor them long past the point where it is serving anyone, myself included. And I had often called that discipline… Sometimes it really is.

Sometimes staying the course is the whole game and the only thing required of you is refusing to give up. And sometimes I am protecting a decision made by a woman I am not anymore, a woman who lacked information, context, or simply wanted something else entirely.

I still cannot tell those two apart reliably, and I have been doing this 14+ years.

Share

Here is what I do know…

If the answer is that I would not choose it again today, I am allowed to change it. I do not have to wait for something to break, or give me permission to pivot. I find I (veryyy often) need to re-remind myself that I am the boss around here.. funny, i know

Then I launched it and charged for it.

There never was any backlash. There wasn’t a single comment, DM, or tweet that I ever remember having about the fact that I was charging a price for a technology tool.

I was scared of something that never came to pass, and it cost me a lot of time and a lot of sleep. Nobody was ever going to give me permission. There is no body running this show but us.

I think a lot of us are standing around waiting on somebody to come along who does not exist. In fact, I think a lot of you subscribe to my channels because you want me to be the person who gives you permission. The person who tells you what comes next...

What this actually looks like is DMs in my inbox where people want me to make the decisions for them. Creators want me to tell them what to do next, which choice to make. And I think that ultimately comes from them not having to be the responsible one for the outcome.

I get it. It is so much easier when the call belonged to somebody else.

But here’s the thing guys, I can only share my journey, the results of what I’ve gotten (right and wrong), and hope that your journey is similar enough to my own that it works the same for you. I’ll always be happy to share what I know, but no person’s two businesses are the same.

So what I suggest instead is hear me when I say you’ve been promoted. You’re the boss. You have to decide now. I’m here as a consultant when I can be, but darling, you are steering the ship.

I want to be honest about something before I send you toward Friday’s episode. I have closed a business that had real money behind it, real interest and real time behind it. I carried it much longer than I needed to because I did not want to admit it was not working and because I had no structure to tell me when it was time to stop. Not a gut feeling. An actual structure with a date and a number and a named outcome.

That is what Friday is about. The 3 things to write down on the day you decide so that the discomfort of the next 90 days doesn’t make the decision for you.

Nobody signed off on this either,

MelRose

P.S. What have you been waiting for permission to do? Reply and tell me. I read every one of these.