Project Person // My old resignation letter

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At 22, I started a business that eventually defined my entire twenties: The Big Fake Wedding. In short, it was a marketing event for wedding vendors, in the form of, well, a big fake wedding.

I could write books about all I (and the angels of a team) learned and experienced through this wild season, but I feel like I am still processing it all, ten years later.

It sounds so silly to say this, but that business was so hard. Perhaps some of it was because it was my first business, or that I was in my twenties, or that we were having babies or moving all over the country with the military.

But I also know now that not all businesses are created equal, and this silly one was just hard.

Don’t get me wrong: It was magical too, with spots on The TODAY Show and the New York Times and events in the Space Needle or Chelsea Piers or featuring one of The Bachelors or a flash mob proposal.

But it was also especially complicated. Take the stress of planning a wedding, but now make it so that the vendors and the guests PAY you to come. Everyone therefore thinks it’s about them. Vendors want to cram the room with people; guests want more room, food, space. The weather doesn’t care at all what anyone wants. Now, do that 25 more times each year in random cities. And make sure you can make payroll on Tuesday.

My friend Christen was a cardiac ICU nurse at the time, and she’d always tell me about coding a patient, losing a patient… My mantra therefore became, “There are no emergencies in fake weddings.” But man, did it feel like there were.

Anyway, I got pretty haggard, and as I mentioned in this piece I wrote about David quitting BUD/S, I eventually “resigned” from this business that I owned, writing myself a letter and everything. I needed some sort of symbol that I was serious. (I ended up selling it to an employee who ran it beautifully for years. COVID was pretty detrimental, but she still keeps the website going, and I wonder if it might have a rebirth one day 🤷‍♀️)

I hadn’t read this letter since I wrote it almost ten years ago, but I found it in the depths of my Google Drive a few weeks back. It was pretty wild to read. I’m sending it now below, which feels like sending you past-me’s decade-old diary.

Counseling and mental health and work-life balance weren’t much of a thing back in those olden days, so the novelty of all of that gets a little belabored here. So does my sailboat story, which my friends also know gets belabored.

I’m really glad I wrote this letter though, both for the symbolism it gave me then and for the reflection it’s giving me now. I think the next email I send y’all will be a comparison between The Big Fake Wedding and my current business (Same Page HR) and why they are so drastically different—and why I am so drastically different too, I suppose.

Hopefully this can be helpful to someone out there, either calling out what you’ve been fighting against or maybe just making you really grateful for where you are now. Or, at the very least, I hope this can be entertaining.

So, with that, my resignation letter…

Written Winter, 2016

Eight years ago, a woman from a radio station sat with me at the first ever event—then called The NotWedding—and told me that I was sitting on “a million dollar idea”.

I laughed and told her that it was just a party.

I never would have guessed that 100+ events, a few dozen employees, and an MBA’s worth of lessons later, this “party” would have generated well over that million dollars.

This business has grown from a single event—a quirky idea that came to life entirely by me and my family and any other random friends I could bribe with free drinks and dancing—to an actual, working business that lives and breathes aside from me.

I have experienced the highs of having your brainchild called “brilliant” on The TODAY Show to the lows of having it called “an F-ing scam” on a Facebook forum. I’ve let good people go, and I’ve had good people leave. I’ve accomplished goals I didn’t even know I had, and I’ve lost battles I didn’t even know I was fighting. More than anything, I’ve learned more in these eight years about business, God, community and myself than I honestly think most people learn in a lifetime. I am grateful, and I am better for it.

I’ve battled the struggles that come with owning a business, and on hard days, I remind myself of the amazing upsides that come with this life: a flexible schedule that allows me to be home often with the kids, a salary that my family depends on, an incredible staff that love and respect me and the company, a never-ending challenge and ever-changing world of experience. This is the only job I have known as an adult, and when I wonder if something else would be better, I remind myself that I have achieved The American Dream.

While I outwardly live the dream (I even got a Facebook message from a past intern last week that said “Your life looks so amazing!”), inwardly I struggle beyond what I believe to be sustainable. I’ve learned that I have anxiety triggers that tend to put me over the edge into sleepless nights and a racing heart and a busy mind. I’ve also learned that this business—the one with events that are out of my control that offers a product that is even more out of my control—is full of these triggers, and they are relentless.

Thankfully, through mentors and books and prayer and a solid support system, I’ve learned how to manage and cope as these triggers come one after another. I’m sent over my threshold and I put my coping plan into effect, and I come back down. I have delegated tasks and responsibilities to my team of leaders to the point that I am never working more than 20 hours a week (and it’s often much less), and I have enacted nearly every piece of practical advice I’ve received in terms of boundaries and balancing. I feel like I am educated and supported, and I am proud of what I have done.

However, after the birth of my third child last year, my capacity to handle these triggers has nearly dissolved.

I sought counseling early this year, and was wisely shown that the X-axis that is my life, the one that is interrupted and spiked by those triggers, has been raised to a higher plateau on the Y-axis, the one that charts the level of stress, just below that personal threshold where I go “over the edge.” Now, when I come upon a trigger, there’s nearly no margin between where my normal is and where my threshold is, and I go over, every time. For nearly two years, I’ve been living in a state of over the edge.

With the exceptions of vacation and Christmas and the occasional weekend, I am operating in a mental and emotional domain that is out of what I can handle. A friend recently offered to pay for me to get a massage, and I sadly realized that I didn’t need a break; I needed an exit.

Last summer, a friend of mine sent me a word she had as she was praying for me: that I was to stop paddling the proverbial sailboat and to instead wait for the wind. Since that time, I’ve been on a mission to create that wind: the plan that would let me bring my x-axis plateau to a healthy and sustainable state. I promoted staff members; I hired flashy talent from the outside; I tried to sell the business to a big public company, complete with a pitch to executives in a fancy NYC high-rise. I even tried to end the company completely, but I learned that it was more difficult and costly to wrap this up than it was to just continue. Each time, my perfect plan to wait has ceased to work out, and I am left paddling my ship to a shore I no longer desire to visit. I don’t want success or new deals or that reality TV show or book deal; I want health. I feel trapped and exhausted and without direction, which is a dangerous—if not impossible—place to lead from.

My husband David recently received military training orders that put him in Texas for a month, and during that time I came to two life-changing observations. First, I spent the first three weeks operating on adrenaline and a laser-focused drive, knowing that I had no option but to carry on for the good of my family, the business, humanity… By the end of the month though, I was so beyond composure, so over the threshold of what my emotional capacity was capable of, that I found myself in constant tears, fighting the urge to walk out the door. I realized that I had actual limits, and I realized that I had hit them. There was over the edge, and then there was the bottom, and I was experiencing how quickly one leads to the next.

Second, my husband—a pillar of strength and stability and calm—was hit with his very own relentless triggers in Texas, and combined with his own raised plateau, he was sent over his very own emotional capacity threshold. They were all different from mine—the plateau, the threshold, the triggers—but they manifested themselves in the same way, and for the first time, he understood. It was a validation and a comfort that I never could have imagined, knowing that I wasn’t crazy or broken, but that I was created in a certain way with specific struggles and weaknesses that had been exposed over and over again, in a personal life with no margin to handle them, for years. For the first time, I wondered if there really was hope for me to escape this constant and crippling anxiety beyond just a new system or staff member or self-improvement or prayer. I felt hope that maybe I could be whole again.

At the end of David’s month away, our family prepared to move to a new state for David’s extended military training, and I neared a breaking point that scared me. Knowing that something had to immediately change, I told my staff that I was taking a few weeks off.

During that time away, I experienced a disconnection that I haven’t experienced in eight years. I realized the depth of the unhealthy emotional patterns and the burden and responsibility I had been harboring. I also realized that my business carries on without me, and that—as two different mentors pointed out to me—I needed to stop being the superhero or the savior.

I felt like I got my soul back, and I didn’t want to lose it again.

I re-entered work last week, from a home we just moved into with an entirely new way of life laid out in front of us. Our community is 300 miles away, and my husband’s job requires more from him—his time, his mental capacity, his stress level—than we are able to give it. My children need stability, and my daughter drew a picture of me crying yesterday with an X on top and a picture of me smiling with a check mark next to it. I have a staff that needs leadership and direction and a physical presence from me, and yet again, I am back to the place where I cannot give what I do not have.

So, I am considering this my Letter of Resignation. I am resigning to the fact that I cannot do everything, save everything, be everything. I am resigning from the idea that I am the right and best person to start this, to lead this, and to grow this business to the next level of development.

Ultimately, I am resigning to the truth that the math does not compute and that a change needs to be made, even if the perfect plan is not yet in place. I am therefore resigning from my role as CEO at The Big Fake Wedding.

This sounds dramatic and extreme and weak and all kinds of adjectives that I don’t want associated with me, but the truth is that I have fought this with every number of alternatives, and I feel as though I am nearing that point of hanging on too long. Leaving my job allows room for health for my family, my business and my soul, and while I don’t know “perfect plan”, I trust that there is one.

There’s little room for faith and prayer when you’re too busy engineering the circumstances to make sense. With hope and trust and a good dose of humility and exhaustion, I am laying down my paddle, raising the sails, and waiting for the wind.

(The experiences and lessons from The Big Fake Wedding were great, but by far, the relationships were the biggest gifts. From team members to vendors to the couples that renewed their vows as bride and groom, I got to work with the very very best people.

One highlight was gathering some of our favorite vendors to create this surprise wedding for Brian and Jennifer, the couple that went on to buy and run The Big Fake wedding.

And then a year-ish after selling the business, on The Big Fake Wedding’s tenth anniversary, they invited me to come to Monday Night Garage to “film a YouTub video,” and then surprised me with a Big Fake Wedding vow renewal of my own, with past team members, friends and family, and so many special touches 😭 It was powerfully redemptive and just the most fun. -Callie)

🪩 An Update 🪩

Thanks to you all, the Amazon Affiliate link I wrote about last time works and I am now FILTHY RICH!

It was really fun to see this thing work—and even more fun to hear about the books you’ve been reading.

One super interesting twist I learned from this is that Amazon Affiliates get credit for anything purchased within 24 hours of someone clicking your link, not just for whatever was linked. So to whomever bought that Oxford Buttondown or Mint Blue Shower Curtain, 🫡

Next time, I’ll share specific reasons why my current business (Same Page HR) is such a drastically different experience than The Big Fake Wedding, in a good way. Stay tuned!