Why I Cried in a Warehouse Bathroom in San Francisco
You may have seen Jenna showing her face more on social media lately. As a small business owner it’s something everyone tells you to do: be on camera, talk to your community. But it’s taken a long time to just do it. Why? Showing up imperfectly is so hard. As a certified life-long perfectionist, showing up imperfectly is actually the nightmare.
That fear hit a breaking point back when Jenna first started working at Farmgirl Flowers in San Francisco. She had finally let go of her healthcare career, and she and Peter had set their hearts on starting a flower farm. She got a job making bouquets at Farmgirl, and it was absolutely amazing.
Every day meant coming in to a long table of the day’s bouquet recipe flowers in buckets, with instructions for the type of bouquet and how many were expected. A full eight hours on your feet. Repetitive. Back-straining. High-speed.
That part she could get used to. The hard part was that Farmgirl has a very specific aesthetic and method for making their bouquets. It takes several months to really nail what they’re looking for, especially if you’re new to flowers.
She was finally hitting her stride, a month in, feet tolerating the long days a little better, picking up speed and hitting quotas. Enter the QA rack.
After each bouquet is finished, you set it on a rack at the end of your station. A runner picks it up and brings it to the Quality Assurance table, where someone makes sure it looks perfect. She spent an insane amount of time glancing over at that table. Does she have my bouquet right now? Does she hate it? Is she rejecting it?
One day, feeling like she was really flowing, she proudly put her prized bouquet on the rack, watched the runner pick it up, grimace, and throw it right onto the reject rack.
Should that have broken her as a grown woman with a master’s degree? Probably not. But it did. She cried in the bathroom.
After pulling herself together, she went to the QA desk with the rejected bouquet, tears in her eyes, and asked what she’d done wrong. She thought it was perfect. She felt like she’d never be able to make a good bouquet, therefore her flower career was over, therefore she was purposeless and broken, therefore she was a failure.
That’s the perfectionism spiral she’d been stuck in for years. It made her procrastinate, made her miss things she shouldn’t have, made her frozen by fear of not showing up perfectly.
But the person at the QA table said, “This bouquet actually looks fine to me. Everyone here has different eyes. The runner probably just prefers a different style. You’re doing a great job.”
So, apparently, you’re the one who judges yourself the most harshly. Everyone is looking for something different, not wasting their brain cells judging you. That was a breakthrough moment. She never looked at the QA table the same way again.
That lesson shows up constantly in day-to-day life as a farmer, a business owner, a parent, a person putting their livelihood, their creativity, their values out into the world for people to see.
This farm has grown so much over the years. We are so excited, maybe not fully ready but definitely excited, about every season ahead. We can’t thank you enough for being on this journey with us.