THE THING ABOUT CHAMPIONS
There’s a difference between someone who supports your work and someone who champions it.
Support can look like a lot of things. A like on a post. A “that’s so cool” when you tell them what you’re doing. The vague encouragement of people who mean well and don’t know what else to say. Support is fine. Support is appreciated. Support is not the same thing as a champion.
A champion shows up differently. They hand out your cards without being asked. They wear your product and photograph it and tag you. They tell people about you in rooms you’re not in, to people who didn’t ask, with the specific enthusiasm of someone who has decided that your success is personally important to them. They find ways to help even when they can’t help directly — sending their daughter, their sister, their people — because the work matters to them and they are not going to let logistics stop them from showing up for it.
I want to be clear about something: I’m not asking everyone to be a champion. That’s not how this works and it’s not what I’d want. Support — buying the thing, liking the post, telling a friend — is real and it matters and it keeps small businesses alive. That’s enough. That’s more than enough. Champions are rare by nature. They’re people who have found a cause that fits them specifically and decided to put their energy there. It’s something different — the specific luck of having someone whose belief in your work happens to be one of theirs. You have your own causes. Use your energy for those. Championing too many things is exhausting and, frankly, dilutes.
My friend Mel was a champion. She believed in Robot Bee Polish before I fully did, which is saying something, because imposter syndrome is a persistent and creative adversary and I have a well-established talent for getting in my own way. Mel knew that. She wasn’t deterred by it. She just quietly, consistently acted like the version of me I was still trying to become was already here and already doing the work, and she treated that version accordingly.
She offered to put a Robot Bee magnet on her car. She was driving to Galveston regularly for medical appointments — a drive I wish she hadn’t needed to make, for reasons I wish didn’t exist — and she thought: the logo might as well do some work on the highway. That’s a champion. That’s someone who sees an opportunity to help and takes it without being asked and without keeping score.
Mel wore my nail polish and took pictures. She shared my posts. She was dealing with things that would have made most people retreat entirely — bags for things no one wants to have bags for, pain that got worse before it got much worse — and she still wanted a Gucci cover for her colostomy bag, because she was not going to let any of it be less than fabulous. That's who she was. That's the same person who introduced me to people as "the one making all my cool nail polish" like it was the most natural thing in the world to be proud of. When she couldn't get to me anymore she sent Misha and Vanessa, her daughter and her sister, because she wanted me to have people around the work even when she couldn't be there herself.
I have other champions. Anna at Gods & Monsters in Orlando is one — a friend of nearly twenty years who also happens to stock Robot Bee Polish, which means her belief in the work is both personal and professional. That particular combination is its own kind of remarkable. She didn’t need to know me to carry the line. She knew me anyway, and chose to carry it, and those two things together mean something different than either one would alone.
Having even one person like that changes how you move. It quiets the imposter syndrome, not permanently, but enough. Enough to keep going on the days when keeping going feels like a lot. Having a few of them is above and beyond and I feel incredibly blessed.
Mel passed away recently after a year and a half of fighting colorectal cancer with a stubbornness and humor that may or may not defy physics. She stayed as long as she could to do the things she wanted to do and to love the people she loved for just that much longer.
I didn’t realize, until she was gone, how often I thought of her while making things. Mixing a new formula and thinking “Mel would love this.” Finishing a bottle shot and reaching for my phone to send it to her. The thought still gets halfway there before it has nowhere to go. That’s when I understood how much of the work she had been quietly holding.
Losing a champion hits differently than other loss. It’s not just grief for the person — though that’s real and it’s significant and it takes time. It’s also a specific kind of creative disorientation. The person who believed in you most specifically is gone, and for a while the work feels unwitnessed in a way it didn’t before. The motivation takes a while to come back. You make things and there’s a Mel-shaped space where the response used to be.
What I’ve learned, in the weeks since she passed, is that the first answer is to allow yourself to grieve and reorient. To be kind to yourself if you flounder. The motivation doesn’t come back on a schedule and that’s okay. When it does, you get back to it. You make things she would have loved, because she would have loved them — and because she would have showed them off to anyone who would care to listen, and probably gotten a magnet made for her car while she was at it.
If you have a champion — someone who shows up for your work in the specific frequency you can actually receive, who hands out your cards and tells rooms you’re not in how good you are and finds ways to help even when helping is hard — tell them how much you appreciate them. Be specific about what they do and what it means. Don’t assume they know. Mel knew I loved her, because I made sure of it. I’m less certain she knew exactly what her belief in Robot Bee Polish did for me on the days when my own belief ran thin.
I’d like to believe she knows now.
Make things. Find your champions. Be someone else’s, if that’s where your energy wants to go.
That’s what she would want.
