On Wednesday evening, I opened my laptop to hold the workshop “Perfume for What Comes Next”. One hour online, making a scent for the next chapter of our lives. I had everything ready. The oils were lined up, my notes were done, and for 11 days I had been sending emails to my list and posting images, videos and audio on Substack, Facebook and Instagram. It was free, and every one of my subscribers had the link in their inbox. I had been so excited about this workshop. I wanted it so much.
Then the start time came and the screen stayed empty. A friend I have known for a long time came online. Another woman joined, stayed a little while and dropped off. That was it. I felt nervous inside, and then this dropping feeling, and then I was sad. Anybody who has ever prepared a table and waited for guests who didn’t arrive knows that feeling. It goes straight into the stomach.
I ran the workshop anyway.
For one woman. And this is not the first time. Online, I have run workshops to a completely empty screen, talking to nobody, because I said I would be there at that time and so I was there. On Wednesday I had my friend, and she got the whole thing. She made her perfume, she asked questions and she got something real out of it. Afterwards we stayed on and just talked, a really good talk between two women who have known each other for years, and that carried me through the worst of the disappointment. I am grateful to her for that. (you know who you are)
Now, I have done this work for 35 years and I know how this goes. When nobody comes, the mind goes looking for a reason, and many of us know exactly where it goes first. Was it the topic, was it the timing, is it me? We have been trained for decades to take the blame for the atmosphere in the room, even when the room is empty. So I made myself look at it properly, with clear eyes instead of a sad stomach.
Here is what I see. When I teach in person, this doesn’t happen. People pay, they come into the room, they turn up. Online and free is a different animal. A free link in an email is the easiest thing in the world to say yes to in your head and then skip. Nothing is lost if you don’t show up. The email arrives, she thinks “oh, how lovely”, and then the evening happens. Dinner, the phone, a tired body, a husband who needs something. And it wasn’t for lack of reminding. I sent emails every day, and in the last two days I sent five reminders, three of them on the day itself. But there was no attendance. The link was right there in the emails, so nobody had to say yes out loud, and a reminder is easy to scroll past when you never said yes in the first place. I had no way to see the empty room coming. It hit me at the start time.
That is useful information. It tells me how people treat a free link on a busy Wednesday evening. I am choosing to read it as that, and to leave my worth out of it.
And then there is the part I think matters most. A workshop takes a lot of time and effort. For weeks it has to stay in focus, and everything else waits. So a free workshop is free for everybody except the woman who makes it. It cost me weeks. Most of us know this from our own lives, even if we have never run a workshop: the dinner we spent two days cooking, the family lunch where half of them cancelled that same morning. We give because we want the people around us to have something good, and when it lands on an empty table it hurts, and then we feel silly for being hurt. So I am going to wait before I run another workshop and give that time to my other work for a while. I am still disappointed today and I won’t pretend otherwise.
Think about how many of us have given our time and our work away as if it cost nothing. We were raised to be useful, to give and to not make a fuss about it. The Good Girl offers, and then she smiles at the empty room and says it doesn’t matter. It does matter. It cost something. The Matriarch knows what her time is worth, and she decides where it goes.
So why did I run it for one woman? Because she came. She gave me her evening, and an evening is a real gift. If I had closed the laptop and said sorry, another time, I would have told her that she wasn’t enough to be worth the effort. I would never say that to a woman. Not to her, not to anybody.
She got all of it and now she has a gorgeous fragrance to use when she feels down.
I think this is what doing something new at this time of our lives looks like. We make something for what comes next, we put our heart into it, we send it out, and we don’t control who shows up. Some evenings the room is full. Some evenings it is one friend. And on the evenings when it is nobody at all, I am still the woman who turned up. And I will always run the promised workshop - even to an empty room.
So tell me, have you had your own empty room? A time when you invited and nobody came? What did you do with it the next day? Hit reply or drop it in the comments. I read every one.
Anna