The Weed - A Small Business Analogy

I’ve been thinking a lot about weeds. Not the ‘fun time drug’, but the nuisance.

A weed is defined by the Merriam-Webster dictionary as “a plant that is not valued where it is growing and is usually of vigorous growth”. Sometimes they are deadly and choke out other plants. Sometimes they are simply just considered an eyesore and a recurring annoyance. Lately, I’ve been looking at them in a different light.

While pottering around with my ever-growing love for plants and all leafy, living things that are green, I’ve come across plenty of weeds. And I’ve realised I have a type of weed - of all things - that I like.

Leafy and green, just like many of the other plants I had potted that aren't classified as a 'weed'.

I look at them, and they are just like the plants I’ve come to love. Various shades of green, leafy and often surviving in an unsuitable place (which I can relate to more than I care to admit). They are universally disgusted, but as I’ve written before, I do have a love for traditionally unlovable things.

While attending to some of my plants, I chose to commit to an idea that had arrived in my mind and I couldn’t seem to shake. I chose a pot, a nice one. And I collected the weeds that I found most desirable, knowing full well that their absence wouldn’t be noticed. I filled the pot with some dirt and arranged the plants inside. I gave it a water and left it on the window sill of the craft room.

I didn’t have high hopes for the plants. I expected them to keel over within a week or so. But it caught me off-guard when I checked back not an hour later, and found them already wilting miserably.

I wondered if I had watered them too much, or been a bit too rough on the roots when freeing them from the earth. Or maybe if it was just the corporate nature of being forced to live in a pot.

Wilting away under expectation.

I watched as they shrivelled away, and later became obliterated by the heatwave that would follow. I know that, had I left them where they were, they likely would have survived (until being inevitably plucked by someone else). And I feel a similar way as a freelance artist, small business owner and even beyond as someone who is queer and chronically ill.

In life, we are shoved into boxes. And many of them don’t fit us, purely because they aren’t designed to.

There are so many set-in-stone societal standards. Expectations. Obligations. Traditions. Most of which I cannot meet, despite my hardest efforts, without compromising my health, sanity and all I am that makes me… ME.

My own small business journey has been the equivalent of the weed growing through the cracks of pavers, or in the gutters of a house. I have been growing – and thriving – in places that people do not traditionally belong, and wilting away at any sight of corporate or capitalist guidance. And I believe that is the way for a lot of the small businesses and artists I have met since 2019.

Many creators experience daily challenges that are often shunned by society, such as chronic health conditions and/or neurodivergence, and your typical 9-5 isn’t possible to abide by. Strict rules, suffocating expectations and punishment for straying even a foot off of the path assigned is misery, like putting a rogue plant in a pot and expecting it to thrive like a rose.

Roses are beautiful. We have plenty in our own garden. But not everyone is a rose.

But it’s not a rose.

It adapts to the unknown and uncertainty, often thriving out of sheer will amidst the chaos. There is an unnerving degree of incompatibility that it’s surrounded by, and yet it’s roots still bury deep into the earth, living by its own values.

Is there anything more terrifying to a capitalist hellscape than someone who isn’t playing by the rules? What use is a person who isn’t working for ‘the man’ to make him rich? What use is a weed to a garden, when it doesn’t follow the rules?

In its own bizarre way, a weed follows the way of our local and hardworking creators. Popping up in unexpected places, against all odds. Thriving despite little support. Always returning, regardless of corporate punishment and aesthetic expectations.

Weeds, like small businesses, are fierce. Weeds, like artists, are messy. Weeds are, and always will be, a part of the garden.

There is something powerfully brave about being a creator in a world as innately dystopian as the one we know today. Artists and small businesses are constantly fighting for a place in a world that wasn’t designed for them to thrive in – and yet, they our doing it anyway, out of spite, out of passion and out of support from the wonderful people who care more about creativity than the reckless greed of giant corporations.

Kimberley (they/them)

Accessories by Antoinette