After the Board Meeting, my time was spent trying to get signatures for the Bylaws so we could get them into our publicly accessible folder for anyone who wanted to access and verify our records. I learned, also, that we needed to have our Official Meeting Minutes, Articles of Incorporation, Adopted Bylaws, and our application for 501(c)(3) status in that folder so we could receive 501(c)(3) status. It was a flurry of paperwork and uploads, but I got them into the folder, and everything was ready to go. I started working on other policies that we needed, using ChatGPT as a guide. I had no idea what policies I neede,d and I also had no templates or even ideas on where to find templates. Words on paper were what I needed; words on paper were what I received. I also started putting together handbooks, at this point, for Board, Employee, Volunteers, Finances, and IT & Security. I was feeling pretty confident and feeling like we were going to really make things happen. Still, there was a needling feeling in the back of my head—a darkness, so to speak—that I ignored. Burnout was on its way in.
It was during this time, too, that I started putting together the missing pieces for the one thing I had wanted to do for a few months: An online skills development course. I had originally planned to do it through burlesque, but, unsurprisingly, I wasn’t getting interest. Velvet Eclipse Burlesque Academy would have to go on the back burner. I started plotting out ideas, and then some things in my personal life took a sideways turn and knocked the wind out of my sails. The academy went to the back burner, and a poetry book emerged. I began writing poems to deal with my grief, anger, hurt, abandonment, etc, and organizing them into a book.