Marissa Brassfield

Not so long ago, I had just finished up a work day that drained me. Back-to-back calls, cognitively intense, maxed out. I was ready to relax and reset. Mike had been with Pierce since about 3 p.m. They'd had a good 2.5 hours together in the house, and some of that time could have gone to homework. We've talked about this. Instead, I joined them and somewhere in the dinner prep Mike mentioned to Pierce that homework would happen after dinner. I remember thinking: Oh, are you going to do that?

On September 28, I had Mohs surgery to remove basal cell carcinoma from my nose. The cancerous tissue was smaller than the eraser on a #2 pencil, and based on a review of my camera reel, seems to have come up around 2015 or 2016. I tolerated the bump for nearly a decade while it slowly grew, covering it with makeup. All the while, I was in full denial and avoidance of what it could be, of even getting an opinion on what it could be.

Last year I worked with a client who triggered me because I needed to do some growing and maturing and evolving. It sent me on a beautiful journey for the rest of the calendar year. This year that same client came back around, and because of all the work I'd done, I was ready to receive that collaboration opportunity and really work with it. Here's what I didn't expect: this time it was the client who needed to do some growing and wasn't ready to. Sometimes people don't grow at the same paces.