I’m sitting at Arté Salon and Spa right now, watching Drop 1 actually happen instead of living inside a Google Doc, a Canva file, and my own head. And I’m feeling, in no particular order: excited, nervous, and hopeful. Mostly all three at once, apparently, which is a thing your nervous system can just do now.

The nervous part is easy to explain. This is the first drop. The first everything, really. First collab, first collab merch line with my mission stitched onto the back of a shirt, first time I get to find out in real time whether the thing I built in my own head actually translates into a tote someone wants to carry their baggage around in (literally, that’s the whole point of the tote).

The excited part is easier still. Because it’s happening. Not “someday, when it’s ready” happening. Actually happening, like, today, in this salon, with actual real people checking out the wellness station, picking up real shirts and totes and hats and looking at them. Holding them.

And then there was the compliment I wasn’t expecting: an acquaintance from around town stopped me today and said it was impressive, that it looked really good. Good feeling, right? Except my brain’s first move with a compliment like that is to argue with it. Second-guess it. Whisper “she’s just being nice” before the sentence even finishes landing. That’s just what anxiety does, it doesn’t let you keep the nice thing, it wants to hand it right back. So today, I’m shoving that voice down, removing it from the equation entirely, and just… believing her. Wild concept for a recovering overthinker, I know.

But the hopeful part is the one I keep coming back to, and it starts with Fadua.

Fadua, the owner of the salon, and I both have teenage daughters. And somewhere in the middle of planning this drop, that stopped feeling like a coincidence and started feeling like almost the whole point. We both know exactly what it looks like when our girls are watching us, whether we mean for them to be or not. So we decided to give them something worth watching: two women in business, cheering each other on instead of competing, showing up for one another instead of just posting about “women supporting women” and calling it a day.

Real women support women.

That’s not just a nice feeling, either. It’s already happening in the smallest, most real way possible: Gabi, one of Fadua’s stylists, texted a friend today that she needed to grab one of the totes I’m selling. Nobody asked her to do that. I didn’t probe her. She just did it, because that’s what it looks like when the advocating-for-each-other thing is actually real and not just a caption or a hashtag.

And then Gabi and I actually sat down for a minute today. No scissors, no foils, just two gals gabbing (no pun intended). And she said something that nearly wrecked me right there in the cozy waiting area chairs: that this is so much bigger than me. That she genuinely believes it’s going to help a lot of people. That yes, there will be work, real work, hard work, but that it’s work in service of something good. I sat there doing the fast-blink thing you do when you’re trying not to cry in a salon on an event launch day on a Tuesday morning.

Here’s the part I want to be really clear about, the same part Gabi already saw before I even said it out loud: this is bigger than me.

It Girl Wellness has never been about me selling you a tote so I can feel good about myself. It’s a mental health and philanthropy movement built into a community-based lifestyle brand. Real talk over anything performative. Honesty over “I’m fine.” A portion of every purchase goes directly to mental health organizations that show up for women every day, because for us, giving back isn’t the after-party. It’s the main event.

So if you’re wondering what success looks like to me today, it’s not a sales number (though my coach would still want that on my radar). If I can help even one person who’s struggling, directly or indirectly, whether that’s through this diverse, beautiful little community we’re building or through a donation that goes to an organization actually doing the work, then today was a win. Mic drop.

I don’t know exactly how big Drop 1 turns out to be. I just know I’m nervous, I’m excited, and underneath both of those, I’m hopeful. And I’d rather build something shaky and real than something polished and hollow, every single time.

Come tell me who your Fadua is: the person who shows up for you, who you would show up for right back. That’s what the Social Club is for.