In our second part of our reflection we ended at saying that after all our efforts, we had finally acquired a clear and sharp idea. That had started in my head, then shaped by market research and then sharpened and given clarity by the artists it is designed for. From that I completed a business plan, something that today was far too ambitious. And here's why.

When you want to start a business from scratch, you obviously want the best possible start to ensure it's a success. Only when this happens it can be easy to lose track of reality to theory, even more so when you're inexperienced. I'm going to be careful now with what I say here because it involves business plans, but to keep it vague I was incredibly ambitious as to what I could get to finance the business. If you can find our old Kickstarter page you would easily see this. To be a nobody (No history, experience or really anything to back me up) asking for the kind of money I needed to start off a company with a full team and a high quality bespoke website was a big no-no.

Everything on my business plan worked well on paper, but not in reality. I got too lost in theory and didn't ground my business on reality; I was not an invest-able person and my idea was too theory based. This is why no matter how hard I tried I couldn't get funded. I didn't give up though. I knew this was something worth fighting for so I looked back on my business plan and completely changed it. It would now become a company that would grow organically, from a single person to many over time, that we would craw before we walk, walk before we run. This is a much tougher road than simply getting a wad of cash and buying everything you need straight off the bat and working immediately (Like buying a car and driving off). This would be like building every single little piece of the car and then driving. But this was something I wasn't going to give up on.

Days after I did this though I was unable to work on this project for nearly 2 months. I don't want to go into details because I'll get too upset but basically someone within the family had begun to suffer from mental illness, and if you haven't experienced that kind of thing before to someone you love, it is easily one of the hardest challenges you would ever face in life. Especially when you're so unprepared from it, one day they're perfectly fine and the next day you wake up hearing arguments and seeing them in a totally...alien state. When it's not them you're trying to talk to anymore, You can see just how fragmented and broken their mind is as they're trying to talk. When there's some glimmers or moments of the real them, you person you used to know, after they say "something isn't right" or they know "something is wrong" with them.

Every day just got more and more exhausting. The times when it seemed they got better and immediately deteriorating back was easily the hardest and most upsetting part about it. It's an incredibly cruel thing to experience, and just as hard on everyone in the family when they're all trying to keep strong and pull together.

I was scared it would be a permanent thing, that I'd lost that person forever. But over time it got better and better and thankfully now to this current day we've returned to a normal state, though we still all bare the scars of it, metaphorically. It's certainly changed the way I see mental illnesses that's for sure. So yeah, this is why I had to take a lot of time off away from this project; Helping and supporting my family.

I'm going to cut this post short here for today, talking about this has really put down my mood too much to move onto anything cheerful straight after.