I know. What a weird phenomenon. What a strange title.

But it’s happening to you. It’s happened to me. This is the absolute “God-Math” story of how I’m here & why you’re even seeing me. Depression is the whole reason you’re reading this. Not yours, but mine.

Losing my Mom to horrible cancer was the most gut-wrenching , most traumatic moment in my life. It moved me to places of my heart I hardly knew existed. I felt a depth of pain I never felt before. I questioned the meaning of life like I never did before. I realized that if I wanted to make an impact & touch the lives of people I knew, I had to make it happen, because life happens & it ends in a split moment, when you realize that your time is past. When I’m laying there & dying from cancer, I want to rest assured that my life had meaning & that I used the pain in my life to touch the lives of others. I want to know that I inspired some young woman to chase her dreams, in spite of all the haters, in spite of all the insecurity she faced. She could use her pain to bless others & her life could be beautiful in spite of the pain she’d felt as a child.

   Sept. 1, we thought Mom was getting better after a 9-month-long battle with cancer. Sept. 3, we found out she was dying quickly & that we had days, maybe weeks. My fiance’, Alan & I were planning our wedding for February 24th. Suddenly, there was no way humanly possible that Mom would make it till then. Sept. 10th, we gathered our family & several friends around Mom’s hospital bed where she lay dying & we said our Marriage vows. ” For richer or for poorer, for better or for worse, Till death do us part.” Knowing full-well that Mom & Dad’s vows would be finished any day now, when she passed. 

   10 days later, Sept. 20th she passed away 2 hours before her 59th birthday. I was now a 23-year-old heartbroken, grieving woman who was motherless & 10 days newlywed. After the funeral, everyone went back to work, except me. I hadn’t worked my job the past 6-9 months, as I was Mom’s caretaker. Now what? I was still in shock & hardly had the mental capacity to see anyone, much less provide the leadership my role at work required. I stayed home, day after day. Depressed, Sleeping til noon & just overall, purposeless. I had nothing to do, except serve my sweet husband who’s very capable. I was slipping into a deep, dark hole of depression. What was there to do?

  A month later, Mom’s best friend, Deb called me up one day saying, “Hey, I’ve got something for you to check out.” I knew my depression was going to worsen as the winter set in & I really wanted to do something about it, before it got really bad, so I was all ears! 

   2 days later, I was all-into learning Online Marketing. This could very well be a full-time income, simply doing Affiliate Marketing for an education platform that offered Online Courses on Investing & Digital Marketing. I spent days, listening to all the content I could find on Digital Marketing, I was super intrigued with the idea & loved the concept of building relationships!!! (Yes, I’m an extrovert!)

   However, when I went to actually promote these courses, something just didn’t feel right.  I had many conversations with ladies who were struggling & I was repeatedly seeing this huge need in other countries for exactly what I had. However, the price point was simply too high for them. I didn’t even feel right offering them some education for thousands of dollars, when they were struggling to simply keep food on the table & clothes on the kids. It wasn’t because they were lazy, it was because they were living in a country without many opportunities. Single Moms deserve to be home with their kids.

  Scrolling Instagram, you see 169 videos of ladies who claim to have started doing this or that & just realized they made $59,000 in 3 hours their first week. Of course, you should do it as well. You jump onto that boat & in 3 weeks, haven’t made a dime yet. New thing rolls around, ah! This is the ONE. Another lady just scams you off by bragging about what she’s made in a month, conveniently not mentioning the fact that she’s built a brand & audience for the past 3 years. Boom. Another down. Maybe you could just post on Upwork or Fiverr, get a few gigs & suddenly make $50K /month, you could go to this specific website for a side-hustle & do some transcribing & make $120/hour. Easy, right? Wrong.

 Perfect Recipe For Disaster & Broke Families.

  What I’m seeing is that no matter what you do – Becoming a Virtual Assistant, Copywriter, Proofreader, Transcriptionist, or do Dropshipping, Affiliate/ Network Marketing, you always need a personal brand & a Target Audience to sell your offers to.

  Fiverr is overloaded. Upwork is jam-packed with competition. You’ll see a job posted, immediately submit a proposal, only to see that there are already 500-1000 other proposals submitted before you. Do that for 5 months & get only 1 job. How’s that for a profitable side-hustle? Always competing to be the cheapest person on earth.