The New Crone: When Knowing What You Don't Want Is Enough
- May 8
- 5 min read
I used to think clarity meant having a plan. Like a real one. Google Doc. Offer suite. A folder named 2026 Strategy. A weird little nested table where everything is color-coded. Something I could point at and say, "See, I'm a queer on a prescribed stimulant with executive function and a working relationship to time."
Mostly, I was waiting to feel certain enough to stop doing things I already knew weren't working.
That's an embarrassing sentence. That's how I know it's probably useful.
—
The New Crone Doesn't Need a Plan to Move
This month's archetype is the New Crone. I keep wanting to make her prettier than she is. More ethereal. But the Crone in my actual life has been less "wise woman in the woods" and more "forty is coming, your tolerance is gone, and you can no longer pretend you don't notice what you notice."
Rude. Accurate.
I'm queer. I spent the first half of my life performing legibility for safety, which is on brand for the queer entrepreneur survival pattern. Make myself smaller to be received. Stay at dinner tables where the food was unsavory, because leaving is more dangerous than enduring.
Audre Lorde Was a Crone: A Queer Lineage of Refusal
Audre Lorde said
"Your silence will not protect you."
That's just crone as fuck.
In good company: Adrienne Rich. Dorothy Allison. Marsha "Pay it no mind" Johnson. The dyke elders in your local community. They aren't famous for what they built. They're famous for what they refused to keep tolerating.
Why yes, I am flexing my BA in Gender & Women Studies.
Thank you for noticing.
What I Can No Longer Pretend Not to Notice
So what I notice is harder to ignore now.
I notice when someone's face goes blank while I'm upset. The micro-freeze. The bracing. My pain becoming something someone else has to survive instead of something they can sit beside.
I notice when I'm the one asking the follow-up question, again. When I'm the one initiating, organizing, remembering things nobody asked me to track. When I'm the one apologizing for the size of my feeling so the room doesn't have to manage it.
I notice when I stop, and how loud the silence gets.
I notice more than ever when I'm grieving something specific and the people around me don't ask. A grief so obvious that I almost want a flashing sign over my head that says, "Please ask me literally one human question."
Nobody should need a neon grief sign with this much time in the room.
I notice it in business too, because apparently my personal life and my professional life are not separate files.
Annoying. They keep syncing in the cloud.
A client asks for strategy. I give them strategy. They don't use it. Then I catch myself trying to make the strategy easier, softer, more digestible, more color-coded. At some point I'm not doing strategy.
I'm doing emotional translation with a Canva subscription. And I'm good at it, which is part of the problem.
The To-Don't List as a Crone Practice
A tactical aside, because I'm trying to get better at connecting my own internal dots and regurgitating something valuable for the 25-30ish people who found their way here.
After my ADHD diagnosis I started keeping a to-don't list. People with ADHD brains do not have an idea problem. Let me repeat that again:
People with ADHD brains do not have an idea problem.
Lord, do we have ideas. We have the opposite problem.
So the to-don't list catches every "good idea" that isn't actually mine to chase.
Clients I'm not pitching.
Offers I'm not building.
People who don't get a follow-up after ghosting for months. Versions of myself I'm not auditioning for.
Each item is a small no.
Small no's = A big pile of NOPE. That compounded interest makes space for my motherfucking creative phoenix to rise into action, instead of a flaming pile of half-started initiatives wandering the halls of my psyche.
The Shadow Crone (And Why She's Earned It)
My experience as a queer entrepreneurs has been a master class in shape-shifting- for the market and the slow drip of conditional acceptance, to overdeliver, undercharge, over-explain, and translate qUiRkY QuEeR cReaTiVe vIbeZZZZzz into KPI's and deliverables that shrink the queer magic and neurodivergent pinball machine that is my prefrontal cortex.
even ai whispers "wtf".
I undercharged on a proposal recently by about $700 because I was matching the energy of someone who hadn't earned that match.
Real number. Real bummer, one that I played an active role in. I also worked on a project before getting paid. There's a reason I call myself an Entraprenotsure™. Because I write blogs about my feelings before sending the invoice.
When Crone shows up in shadow for me, I become grumpy as hell about it. She wants to mutter "it's right there" while someone circles the same issue for the ninth time. She wants to bill a 50% surcharge for every ignored piece of advice. She wants to set an out-of-office that says "gone."
Honestly, I support that bitch. Someone get her an iced coffee.
I'm just not interested in becoming someone who confuses discernment with contempt.
My old pattern was over-functioning until I got resentful.
The new one has to be catching myself before helpfulness turns into a hostage situation. The client who's "going to grow into" my prices isn't actually going to grow into my prices. The offer that "could be amazing" if I just kept polishing it has been polished for three years.
Potential is not a relationship. My behavior is. And when my dopamine deficient ass is chasing possibility, there's no space for growth.
My no IS the strategy.
Knowing What I Don't Want Is Enough
I don't have the next thing fully figured out. Like will I remember to send that invoice or side quest a shower? I don't know which of my offers is going to be the keeper, or if this business will just morph into me doing archetype readings from my closet while I hide from my toddler. I do know that I'm not going to do another eighty-minute unpaid Zoom for a project that hasn't been signed. I'm not going to translate my own value into smaller words for someone who isn't actually hearing me...unless they can afford it (inflation ain't fucking around).
Speaking of those Closet Archetype Readings...
I made a whole ass page on this offering because I am convinced pattern-recognition is just good strategy.
About Amanda — the Entraprenotsure™ behind MYQB.
I'm a queer, neurodivergent, recovering perfectionist who built a business out of grief, creativity, and way too many browser tabs. I’m not here to give you a one-size-fits-all formula. I’m here to help amplify your voice, your rhythm, and a way of showing up that feels like you.
I started Mind Your Queer Business for the misfits, the feelers, the overthinkers, and the creatively stubborn—especially those building empires in nap time increments. Around here, we build brands and marketing strategies that actually make sense for who you are, not who the internet told you to be. If you’ve ever felt like entrepreneurship wasn’t built for someone like you, good news: you get to rebuild it.
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