Well, where did March go?

Maybe into the void, but one thing is for sure: we are knee deep in the Spring of Deception here in St. Louis! Sometimes winter, glimpses of Spring, and lazy summer days. All in a week or less.

As April is in full force now, March’s daffodils are still in every corner. Yellow, optimistic, completely unbothered by what’s happening around us (which is the best thing to do).

Daffodils, the botanical Narcissus.

Yes. That Narcissus. The gorgeous Greek kid who saw his own reflection in a pool of water and couldn’t stop staring. He stayed there until he died, and the flower grew where he fell.

The origin story is memorable. Terrible branding strategy.

Here’s the thing: Narcissus wasn’t invisible. He was, by all accounts, stunning. Everyone could see him. Ugliness was never an issue for him.

But the only person he was looking at was himself.

And some brands have a version of that.

The kind where you’ve been refining and (re)tweaking your presence, message, copy, colors, or visuals to the point of exhaustion that somewhere along the way you stopped checking whether anyone else actually understands it. It is subtle, but you end up staring at your own reflection and calling it strategy.

And it can get worse. Some people don’t just stare at the reflection; they replace it entirely. Oscar Wilde wrote a whole novel about it. Dorian Gray kept the beautiful face public while the real version aged and rotted in the attic. Everyone admired the surface, but not a single living soul saw the truth.

Is the mirror talking to you?

There comes a time when the ultra-polished brand doesn’t match where you are now. The about page you wrote two pivots ago. The messaging that sounds right but feels like a costume you forgot to take off. Your presence is in the Spring of Deception hell.

The gap between the public version and the real version of who you are becoming has a cost. It’s invisibility dressed up as presence.

Now the flower itself, the actual daffodil, does the opposite of its namesake. It’s one of the first things to push through frozen ground at the end of winter. It doesn’t wait for perfect conditions. It doesn’t check the forecast. It just comes up. And it faces outward, not down into a pool.

That’s the move.

Stop refining the reflection. Turn the face outward. Let the version that’s been growing under the surface push through, even if the ground is still cold and the timing feels off.

So here’s a quick exercise:

What’s the version of you that lives in the attic?

The one you edit out of your public presence. The part of how you work, think, or speak that you’ve been smoothing over because it didn’t seem professional enough, marketable enough, or safe enough.

Write it down. One unpolished paragraph. If it sounds like it belongs on your current website, it’s the Dorian Gray version. Try again.

Then ask yourself: what would change if you let it out?

Most people do the exercise, feel something shift, and then close the notebook. At some point, the attic version just becomes the version you buried.

But the daffodil comes up anyway, in the frozen ground and all.

I believe that’s the whole thing, really.