8th Place LLC

I Love @garyvee. And I still Love @veefriends. But something has changed in how I experience the VeeFriends community, and I've been struggling to put it into words. For a long time, I believed I had found a place where I genuinely belonged. A community built around values I deeply believe in. Kindness. Empathy. Accountability. Friendship. Family. And that beautiful idea Gary talks about so often… "Strangers become acquaintances, acquaintances become friends, and friends become family." I believed in that vision when I came into this community. I still believe in it. But hearing those words has become increasingly bittersweet for me. Because for some people, that's exactly what happened. And I'm genuinely happy for them. For me, it only partly worked out that way. Some of the people I came to Love and consider family are still in my life, and I'm incredibly grateful for them. Others aren't. And some of the relationships I believed were much deeper than they actually were have been among the most painful experiences I've had in this community. I know I'm not an easy person. I'm intense. I'm emotional. I ask a lot of questions. I care deeply about understanding things and being understood accurately. And when something doesn't make sense to me, I don't just pretend it does to make everyone more comfortable. I want to talk about it. Understand it. And when possible, solve it. But somewhere along the way, I started feeling like expressing those parts of myself made me less welcome. When I opened up about genuine struggles, I often felt dismissed as negative. When I raised concerns about things I believed were unfair, I was told I was complaining. And when I tried to have deeper conversations about problems, I increasingly felt like the expectation was simply to stop talking about them. Accept things the way they are. Or leave. Sometimes it wasn't even said that gently. More than once, when I was hurting and trying to talk about it, people in the community told me to shut the fuck up and stop complaining. That's been especially difficult for me to reconcile with a community built around the very values that attracted me to it. Because I don't believe kindness means only making room for people when they're happy. I don't believe positivity means pretending problems don't exist. And I don't believe friendship becomes family by avoiding the uncomfortable parts of knowing another human being. But I also understand that nobody owes me the kind of relationships I'm looking for. And I can't force a community to become something for me that it hasn't naturally become. So lately I've been stepping back. Spending less of my time and emotional energy trying to find the belonging I thought I had found there. And putting more of that energy into people and places where I feel comfortable being fully myself. And the strange thing is… I've been happier. Not because I stopped Loving VeeFriends. Not because I stopped believing in Gary. But because I've stopped trying so hard to make my experience match the vision I originally fell in Love with. That's the bittersweet part. I can still Love the brand. I can still celebrate the people who found their family there. I can still be grateful for the friendships that survived. And I can simultaneously acknowledge that the community I once believed would become my home hasn't entirely felt like home to me. Maybe that's nobody's fault. Maybe some of it is mine. I'm willing to own that. But I spent too much of my life feeling alone while surrounded by people to keep trying to earn belonging by becoming easier for everyone else to experience. I'd rather have fewer people in my life who genuinely Love and understand who I am than a thousand people who only enjoy the version of me that never makes them uncomfortable. I haven't stopped believing in strangers becoming friends and friends becoming family. I'm just learning that the people who become my family might not always be the people I expected when I first walked through the door. And as much as that realization hurts… There's something beautiful about finally allowing myself to discover where I belong instead of continuing to insist that I already found it. 💜