I grant you this: it was a large cubicle… but still… it was traumatizing for me.Not at the beginning though. When I took the job, I was SO happy to have a stable job and a regular income!After a few weeks, the magic disappeared and my artist spirit was imprisoned in this building from 9 am to 5 pm Monday to Friday.

Some of you may relate to that.

If it had been in a nice part of the city, maybe it would have been a little bit easier. But it was not the case, it was in the industrial area of North Hollywood.

My office was in the corner of a small room built in a warehouse. Some days when I was in that room, I would suddenly realize where I was and I could see myself from above the clouds in the sky, locked up between those four walls, doing something I did not like to do, just to survive.

I felt miserable.

Because I needed money for me and my children, many days I went in there at 7 AM to do overtime hours.On top of that, I was spending about 4 hours every day in the Los Angeles traffic, between dropping my kids off at school, going to work and doing the same the other way in the evening.

I was feeling very very far from living my dream.

It was not what I envisioned when I came to America a few years prior. We had sold everything and left France to live the American dream. And now here I was, preparing my divorce, struggling for money, not able to create art because I was mentally too stressed for that.

Now when I look back at those days, I am happy.

I am happy because I am not there anymore.

I am also happy because I did experience those events and I can appreciate my current circumstances even more.

About 10 years ago I started changing my life.

The 1st thing I did was to raise my standards. I wrote down a list of things that I will no longer tolerate.

Making decisions is very important. It does not seem that it always works because sometimes you make a decision and you end up not doing what you decided. But there may be different reasons for that. Maybe it was the wrong decision. Maybe it was not the right time to make that decision.

But you can make that decision again. Or you can make another decision.

Try again.

So I decided to raise my standards. And what followed after that was a series of events that little by little, made me evolve towards the creation of my current home business. This was 9 years ago. I am very grateful to myself for not giving up, and instead of collapsing completely, I got back up and made a decision to keep going without knowing what was going to happen, but knowing that it would all be for the best.

Today I am here, as I am writing this, outside on our backyard porch. We live on a ranch house in California and I replaced my cubicle with nature. From my table, I can see my daughter, in the picture, working on her own projects under our beautiful tree.