Flashback to last week, when I pretended my lifestyle is conducive to white jeans on a weekday (hint: it isn’t; not shown: the big lily pollen stain just to the side of the rip on my knee).

It’s summertime and the livin’ is [relatively] easy. I’m forcing myself to work shorter days, take a few afternoons off, and make time for the creative projects that collected dust on my to-do list.

It’s taken C and I years to adjust to the seasonal swing of our business. We used to spend the summer months in a panic, biting our nails and stressing over the drop in sales as if each July marked the floral industry end times. Now that we’re old pros (ha – who am I kidding?) we let ourselves take advantage of the downtime to recharge our batteries and prep for the upswing.

At the start of this month, we celebrated our second anniversary of officially owning the family flower shop. I remember how excited — and nervous — we were to move into our current space and start this adventure together. In some ways it feels like yesterday, but at the same time, my life before entrepreneurship feels like another existence.

C and I were chatting recently about how far we’ve come in the last couple of years, and I confessed to him that I truly believe our business saved me. I casually throw around the term Quarter Life Crisis when describing my mid-20s, but truthfully, I was in a dark place. The flower shop gave me a fresh start: a chance to flex my creative muscles, put my business degree to use, and stay too busy to think about my anxieties and self-doubt. And in the daily grind of the last two years, I bloomed (forgive the cheese) into a strong and capable, albeit exhausted, B-O-S-S.

Of course, I’m still learning. In fact, just today, I finally figured out how to do my own bank reconciliations in Quickbooks. My accountants are so proud; I know because I called to tell them.