The lockdown presented a unique opportunity for me when it first got announced. I won’t lie, I was please the lockdown was here, I saw it as an opportunity to catch up on parts of my business that needed improving. I also wanted to focus on learning new things and doing activities to reignite my creative passions.
I was planning so many things to do the first couple of weeks and had a few large work projects to keep me busy but then things took a turn for the worse. Within two weeks all my client work had dried up and I had no income at all. I was relying solely on my savings and any help the government could provide. It was a strange feeling to go from feeling like I’d been presented this great opportunity with so much more time and yet suddenly being left on a zero-income directionless path. Safe to say it caused some great mental and emotional strain.
When I first started the hobby/ idea of TouchSkye Designs in 2014 it was born out of a difficult and emotional time in my life. I was on the Isle of Skye in Scotland scattering my mother’s ashes, she sadly had taken her life 4 months prior which left a massive hole of confusion in which direction to take my life and my career. Among many things she was an artist and sadly she never got to live out her dream of being a great designer. Her loss gave me a greater depth of empathy to the problems others faced. So that moment being in Skye I vowed to do my best to help others reach their dream and achieve their goals, the sky’s the limit I thought, hence the birth of TouchSkye Designs.
Getting through COVID has been a severe test of my mental endurance for one thing. Going from having too much time on my hands to being completely despondent in the second month with no income whatsoever left me in a rut. During the third month, I start to get some small work enquiries and my positivity has begun to return, it’s safe to say I’ve gone through a large range of mixed emotions.
One year ago, a mere few days into the launch of my business I dropped dead from a heart attack, at 31. It’s not something you envision for yourself in the early days of a business launch but my heart and the universe seemingly had other plans. I especially didn’t envision a power cable going up through my groin into my heart as potentially one of the “teething problems” people mention occur in the first couple of weeks when launching a business. Yet as severe as it all was I’m luckily still here to tell the tale. My brief stint of death a year ago is what got me through COVID, if I’m completely honest. I think most of us had this fear of hitting rock-bottom during or in the aftermath of COVID. I’m quite fortunate, even lucky perhaps to have died once already because for me rock bottom is dead, and I’ve already ticked that one off my list. It’s safe to say nothing can compare to that which presents and enormous amount of responsibility to keep going.
Life knocks all of us down, and we get back up, it then knocks us down again and we get back up. It’s only when we stay down that it’s all truly over. Life, business and our journeys are always up and down, like a heartbeat, if they weren’t then life would be flat (dead). So, I always get up again and keep going.
- Adam Carley Founder of TouchSkye Designs
Email: adam@touchskyedesigns.com