Hey everyone, I hope you're doing well. Tonight's video is going to feature a few friends of mine that just happen to be really good at telling a story. Links to their channel will be down below. Make sure you go subscribe and on to the first story. Steam rising from the winding, labyrinthine concrete streets of New York City in the winter. The sky is deep, black and endless, lined with a cold fire of dying stars.  Walking home from a late shift at a shitty job, hands jammed in his coat pockets, he craves a cigarette he can't afford to buy. His stomach grumbles in protest from a freezer-burnt TV dinner at lunch. He hasn't eaten since then.  While he was Levi Reid of New York City, he who spent years of his life in college only to discover he was not able to find a job in the field he studied, he just resigned to working a minimum wage job with terrible hours. He wanted out. He just didn't know how to go about doing it. Levi mulled over this as he trudged through the park at night. Cobos lay on beaches in freezing weather with haunted eyes following him silently as he walked past. He did not avert his gaze. A few moments later and farther down the path, he glanced up, feeling uneasy. The street lamps up ahead would flicker for several seconds before dying out entirely. This continued one by one until the lamp nearest to him went out. This was accompanied by the distant thump of hooves beating against pavement. Confused, Levi came to a halt. He strained to listen, not entirely convinced the sound was real and not just a product of his own mind. The nearer the hooves beating drew, the more the rest of the world seemed to fade out and away as if somebody was turning a dial. His own heartbeat, thudding in his ears, seemed to sink with the outside source and then an eerie silence. Over the crest of the hill came a horse and a rider.  Atop its back was a constantly shifting enigma, a large blur. Levi could not comprehend these morphing colors, the likes of which he had never seen. And then it spoke, Do you wish to die? The rider did not speak English, but somehow Levi understood its garbled tongue. He found he could not speak and its presence. I send, do you wish to die? Levi could not think clearly, his mind ran racing in a thousand different directions, threatening to break apart entirely. All he could manage was, who are you? The rider's steed snorted, steam billowing from its flared nostrils. It pawed the ground impatiently with one enormous hoof. The rider's ever-changing features seemed to settle somewhat into that of a broad, vaguely humanoid shape. Its eyes remained blurry, rapidly shifting, looking straight through him to his soul. Ask not who I am, but what? Without warning, the rider reached out and placed its hand to Levi's forehead. From its fingertips and into his brain flowed eternity, chaos, destruction, life and death, rebirth, kings and men, war and famine, the secrets of the universe, everything. Levi dropped to his knees, wailing in agony. The rider observed him quietly, watching with indifference as Levi doubled over. His whole body trembled and shook as he collapsed, even heaving once. Blood spurted from his mouth, staining snow the color of brilliant crimson beneath him. For a long moment, he was still. At the sound of the rider's voice, his eyes ruled in that direction and he remained silent, but willing. A soldier standing in attention to his commander, Go forth, mortal, and tell your fellow man, this world will end in forty-nine days. Levi's eyes ruled in his skull, replaying the terrible secrets he had seen again and again and again. Having been a witness to those horrors, he found he was no longer quite the same, no longer quite human. The rider lifted the reins of the stallion, snapping them once, those cold hellfire eyes never leaving Levi's own. For I am death and you shall follow me. In a blaze of flashing white, the rider and the horse were gone. Levi lay there for what felt like a very long time, hearing those words and those words only. Then he slowly rose to his feet among the blossom of red in the frost and snow. The sharp breath of winter brushed past, but he didn't mind. There were greater concerns to be had now. The world was going to end, and Levi was the messenger. All great riders claimed to suffer from insomnia at least once in their lives, although I'm sure a bulk of them misused the term and glorified the disorder. After all, all artists struggle, and it seems that lack of sleep runs common among those who strive to hammer out the next big thing. I wasn't immune to this, and at risk of sounding cliche, I simply work better in the wee hours of the morning, unless I happen to be suffering from rider's block, which also seems to plague those who starve for our heart. I recently moved to my home, which is perched neatly upon a hill. It's a ranch home, so there's not much around. Sometimes when my fingers are tired from typing, and my brain feels like it will explode, I'll go into the kitchen, make a cup of tea, and look out into the night. Below me there is another ranch home that I could see from my window. Although it had been empty for quite some time, the house below me wasn't unlike my own, sitting alone atop of dried grass and dirt. It was two stories, white with a wraparound porch. For being empty, it was well kept, although there were weeds sprouting everywhere, and one of the windows, I had guessed the kitchens assuming the home's layout was anything like my own, was broken. I hadn't noticed it until a few months after my move, but on one of those nights where I was pushing for AM, I noticed the lights on in that house, immediately my brow creased into a curious expression. Knowing that the house had been abandoned, and it didn't seem like anyone would be moving into it any time soon. I leaned over the sink and put my face as close to the window without touching it. But I could see no movement from within the house. A few days had passed until I noticed it again. Although looking back now, I can confidently say it had been happening every night since the moment I moved in. The second time I noticed it, I took a quick glance at the clock sitting over my dining room table. It was 3.30am, and again, I could see nothing out of the ordinary other than the fact that the lights were on. The next night had happened again, and on the night after that, although I probably would have been awake otherwise, I forced myself into the kitchen at 3.25am, stirring my tea, and staring intently at the window. I began to feel anxious, even though the notion of the lights turning on shouldn't be strange, but given the fact that it is occurring nightly in an empty house around 3.30am was a bit unsettling. I watched the minute hand on my clock swipe to 30 after, and I turned my head towards my window. Sure enough, the lights flicked on, just like they had the other three nights. I leaned over the sink once again, this time pressing my forehead all the way up against a glass, as if doing so would give me a better view. But still couldn't see anything moving about. I leaned back, frowned, and shrugged. Logically, it could be anything, ranging from squatters to a rare electrical issue, but at the time I figured I would let it go, because I couldn't be bothered to worry about something so seemingly insignificant. I had a writing deadline, and needed to make that my top priority. Two weeks passed, and although I tried my hardest not to stroll into the kitchen every morning at 3.30am, I failed miserably, and observed the same thing every night. It even got to the point where I would stay in the kitchen for hours, before and after the lights would flick on, simply to spot traffic, either in or out of the house. But as far as I could tell, nobody ever entered or exited, even during the day. The lights would eventually turn off around dawn, I wouldn't turn back until 3.30am. During the third week I ventured over to the home. Even for cars or anything hinting at human life, but the closest thing I found was a bike tire leaning against the back porch steps. Given the weeds growing around it, it had probably been there for a while. The house sat empty, as a recently dug grave, and in the moment I couldn't help but feel a little sorrowful. It really was a beautiful home, but the lack of anyone living in it made it exude a sense of nothingness and despair. I went around to the broken window, and my assumption that it had belonged to the kitchen was correct. I peered in, although from what I could tell, nobody had been in the room for quite some time. A thin visible layer of dust covered both the counters and the floor, and the cobwebs had made their way across the sink faucet, as well as the ceiling corners. Though I am no detective, I noticed the dust covered floor had no footprints, and this disturbed me for obvious reasons. In order to alleviate my fears, I told myself the lights turning on had to be some type of electrical anomaly, and I stepped down from the porch. I walked backwards until I could see the entire house in my view, shielded my eyes from the sun, and took one last look. I scanned from left to right, hoping to see any hint of anyone or anything living there. But just as before, there was nothing but emptiness. That night, a freak thunderstorm rolled through the area, and for once it wasn't the writing that kept me awake. The thunder sounded like bombs falling, and before I knew it, I was up at the kitchen at 3am making tea. I finished my last sip when the lights turned on in the house below, and although it was a site that was familiar to me then, I still got up and looked out the window. I couldn't see as well as other nights because of the rain, but sure enough, all the lights were on like usual. My hands rested on the edge of the sink, and just then a clap of thunder exploded. My hands tightened and I jumped, but calmed down rather quickly. About 30 seconds passed, and the power went out. I was only able to register the lights going off in the house below me for a mere second before I heard a knock at my back door. I jumped again and gripped the edge of the sink even harder. It was completely dark, and I could barely see a thing. I stood there, breathing heavily, then waiting to see if I could hear the knock again. I tried to convince myself it was just a thunder, but 5 seconds later, another knock. I slowly walked towards the door, being too scared to look behind the blinds. I walked as closely to the door as possible to see if I could hear anyone outside. The rain made it difficult to hear, but I listened as hard as I could. Is anyone there? A voice said from the other side. It was a woman's voice. It sounded shaky and troubled. I kept quiet, too confused to respond and too frightened at the aspect of someone standing outside my door this late and in a storm. Please, if someone is there, I need some help. She said. Although by the time a layer of goosebumps had covered my skin, I answered back. After all, if this woman needed help, I couldn't just leave her outside alone. Who are you? I asked. My name is Sandy. I live in the home below you. My power is out, and I have no lights or candles. I can't be in the dark, not at this time. I frowned. Either this woman was lying, or I was going crazy, because there is no way there was a woman living in that house, but that wasn't the most frightening thing at the moment. It was the fact that the power went out may as seconds ago, and there was no way the woman could have walked from her home to mine in that amount of time. That house has been empty since I moved in, I responded. Please, just help me. I need the lights on or else. I rubbed the space between my eyes. Even if this woman was real, she was making no sense. I'm sure the power will be back on soon. It'll be okay, I said. She responded with a huge sigh, and I could tell she was sobbing now. A few seconds went by. I calmly waited to hear if she would say anything else. After thinking she gave up, I could rest easy. I heard her say, I saw you, you know. My eyes widened and my stomach dropped. I quickly thought back to my visit at the house, making sure my memories were correct in the fact that I saw nobody at the home. What are you talking about? I asked. I saw you looking in my home, through the kitchen window. A moment went by, my breathing quickened. I felt my heart beat in my head, and just then, thunder rang out again. I jumped and I squeezed my eyes shut. When I opened them, she responded again. He saw you, too. I paused and fear seized my heart. I was completely sure there was nobody at the home, let alone two people. She continued talking. He comes at this time, and unless I get some lights on, he will take me. He's tried before. At that point, I was completely confused and unsure of how to respond. So I replied. Sandy, like I said before, I'm sure the lights will be back on soon. Just go home and wait it out. She began crying again. As soon as I step into darkness again, I would ever be able to come out, and when he's done with me, he'll be after you. He's seen you now. She laughed a little, the way those who feel exhausted from crying often do. I stepped closer to the door again, and slowly pulled the corner of the blinds away. I had to see for myself if there really was a woman out there, and I wasn't going crazy. Just then, a bolt of lightning came across the sky, lighting up everything in my immediate view. To my horror, there was nobody standing on the other side of the door. My porch was completely empty. It wasn't until well into the next morning that I felt any sense of calm, and decided I would go looking into the history of the house. After a week or so of searching online, and asking around with the locals, I found out the most disturbing information. About three years earlier, a woman named Sandy Carmichael lived in the home below me. Given the facts that the rumours spread like wildfire, I'm not sure how much information was the truth. But apparently she began telling her closest friends and relatives that a being was living inside her home, and came to her around the same time every morning. Apparently this being had attacked her when she was standing in her kitchen, which led to the broken window. Although as soon as she turned on the light, it went away. Long story short, she continued turning on the lights at the same time every night, in order to keep the being away. Why she hadn't just moved is beyond me, although I'm sure her story would be the same for every other person who chooses to stay in an alleged haunted house. It was her home. The story continued that after about six months, again this is hearsay, her doctor prescribed her a sedative, and finally one night she slept through the 3.30am mark and never woke up. Her death was said to be a suicide, but some have come to believe whatever Sandy babbled on about may have been responsible. I couldn't help but think of the night of the thunderstorm with utter terror, and I'm quite convinced the ghost of Sandy Carmichael visited me. One may ask why I believe this, especially those who are skeptical of the supernatural. But Sandy Carmichael said that whatever was terrorizing her was going to start terrorizing me. The lights haven't appeared in the home below me since that night. Although this hasn't done anything to calm my fears, I've started to hear strange noises in my home, and I'm worried things will escalate. I've debated whether or not to turn on the lights in my own home at 3.30am, although doing so would be admitting for sure that I thought something unnatural was in my house, and I'm not quite ready to do that. There's another thunderstorm going on right now. However, and I've made sure I have plenty of candles and a flashlight, just in case. I keep telling myself that all rational human beings carry extra candles and flashlights in thunderstorms, and that I'm not admitting to anything, but the lights have already begun to flicker. Every time they do, my stomach turns over. It's 3.04am. I'm hoping the power stays on. The white snow blankets the ground around him, and he shivers. He stares into the darkness, his eyes playing tricks on him, showing him faint outlines of monsters. He blinks, and they disappear. He pulses his jacket on a little tighter, and touches his front left chest pocket. For reaffirmation, still there. He trudges on. The bitter wind nips at his face, and he wishes he had worn more on his legs than just jeans. But, it'll all be over soon enough. Just this one journey, and he can finally go and continue his life. Maybe go to grad school. He reaches a crest that gives him a view of a few hundred snow-drenched trees, fading away into the snowfall. He begins walking down the crest. So I twist a tree, making it fall, to try to deter him. He stops, looks around, frightened, cold and confused. He never sees me. I leave him laying peacefully in the snow, a glint of red in the moonlight to contrast the white angelic powder around him. I watched him touch his pocket, so I know immediately where he is. I unfold it. I collapse in the snow. My knees buckle, and I wail. Hannah, how's it going? Not bad, Mick. Stable. Hopefully, he could wake up soon. The doctor replies. I keep my eyes closed, not just because the lights of the hospital room feel like daggers through my eyelids. But because once I open them, I can't close them again. The dynamic of the room will have changed. I need to listen. Hey, so Doc, did he... Mick pauses, choosing his words carefully. Did he have it? Mick, the doctor scolds. Sorry, Doc. Geez. It's been all the talk lately. I couldn't help it. I keep thinking of the adventure it would lead to. Mick! Shhh! He's waking up. His heartbeat is quickening. Upon hearing my cue, I open my eyes, seeing the silhouettes over me. As my eyes adjust, a gray-haired, older man peers into my eyes. Hey, kiddo. You took it pretty hard out there. How are you feeling? I can't muster a word. I think he takes my silence as an okay. Great. Well, I'll leave you to it. Come on, Mick. Let's give him some time to rest. They exit the room, and the pain hits me, and my toes must have gotten frostbitten in the snow.  I touch the rolled-ups of the paper and decide to leave it where it is. Sure. It's gross. But if I hadn't left it in my pants pocket, the doc would have taken it, I'm sure. I stare at the ceiling tiles and try the past of the time by counting the flecks of black amongst the white and gray. One thousand three hundred and sixty-four. I count again, one thousand four hundred and three. Eventually, the doctor comes back, and deems me well enough to leave. I sign the papers, get dressed, and get the hell out of there. Luckily, there's a bus stop right outside the hospital. I take the fifteen to the west side of town. I'm not going home. As I walk down Emerson Street, I feel eyes on my back. I turn around. Nobody. I trudge along the path I used to travel so often in my youth. I went to school near here. I'd walk the street to go home in the afternoon. Sometimes, I just stop and stare at the grass between the sidewalk and the road, feel the sun on my back, defrosting me cell by cell. But this time I can't stop, there's no time, there's also no sun. I open the door to the dollar store, grab a basket, and pile it with scissors, twine, and a pair of black and red gloves. I was pushed for time so I couldn't get anything else, but this would do. I make my way down the street, I pass the school, and almost pause, but something stops me. My own subconscious probably. The sidewalk ends and transfers to forest, so I know I'm close. As I walk through the dense trees, I keep my eyes open for any hint of footprints or broken twigs. When I'm satisfied, I drop my trousers and bend over, I unfold it for the second time. This time, I can control my voice, but a pair of tears leak from my burning eyes. It whispers my name, it caresses my skin, it taunts me, I fold it back up and put it in my pants pocket. Once I reach the rock surface, I look up at it. The height makes me queasy, but I put my foot between two rocks and boost myself up. An hour later, and I've only made it halfway to the top, the sweat drips from my forehead, and I watch it plummet all the way down. I count in my head as it falls, 16 seconds. The jacket I'm wearing is restricting me, and making my skin swelter. I knew it would be so hot and a place so cold. I reach a section in the rock that has no visible footholds. I look around desperately, I see a cross the rock face, about 20 feet to my left. There's a small ledge. I try to climb across to get to it, so maybe I can rest for a second. I reach, grab, place a foot, transfer weight. Reach, grab, try not to fall, find a foothold, plant a foot, and transfer my weight. I'm about three feet above the ledge, and about six feet horizontally away. There's no more footholds I can step in. Only a little ledge, about an inch deep, that my hands are holding onto. I'm going to have to climb using just that. I shuffle my feet free, and feel the pressure in my hands immediately. The pressure is too much, I feel my grip weakening. I reach my feet blindly for the foothold, but my hands give up, I'm falling. I count in slow motion, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen. I squint my eyes, and my thoughts flash before my face. I can't think. I'm just focused on hitting the ground, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen. Confused, I open my eyes and no longer see a ground. There's no rock face, there's only me, and emptiness filled with light. I close my eyes again, and I open them. I feel myself falling again, I feel the ground jolt my boots, and I try to bend my knee to brace myself. Somehow my fall was broken, I look around, I see the tops of the trees in the distance, and I see the rock face, but now I'm at the top.  As I scan the horizon, I see the destination. As the sun dips lower in the sky, I waste no time. I check my watch, I begin to run. After a while, I stop to rest, seven forty-nine, damn, sunset is less than an hour away. I have no choice. I run, eight, eight fifteen, eight thirty. I can't do it, I'm winded and there's less than thirty minutes until I die. I sprint as hard as I can, I push through the pain, my feet are in so much pain I just disregard them. My mind goes into a state of meditation, I'm aware, I see it all. The world, the town, my house, my family, my bed, home. As light fades quickly, I begin to see a glint of ash through the trees. I scramble my last bits of energy together and double the speed of my bounds. I collapse on the floor next to the structure. Dusk is making everything much harder to see through my tired, weary and strained eyes. I feel their presence, I feel a thousand needles graze my lower legs, barely pressing hard enough to draw blood. A series of clicks pierce my eardrums, I feel a warm trickle down my ear and jaw. I force my eyes open one more time to catch a glimpse of them. It holds a sharpened blade resembling a scalpel and slices into the front right side of my pelvis. At first I don't react. The blade is so sharp. I scream in agony as it removes a chunk of my thigh, taking with it the scrap of cloth previously belonging to my trousers. I watch as it throws my leg to the side and scurries away on the thousands of needle-sharp legs with the pocket that contains the fate of the world. The creature unfolds the paper and I watch as one of its eyes swivels back to me. I see it can only be described as a grin. It rushes back to me at an unfathomable speed and stares into my soul. It carves its signature into my forehead in a split second and steals one of my eyes. It makes clicking sounds and I see him again. He's laying on the ground, sliding towards me as if being pulled by an invisible rope. His body comes within three feet of me and it begins to float. It slowly rotates over face to face, one corpse floating over another. The creature makes a clicking noise once more and the building next to me sinks into the ground. The top of the building is covered in leaves and trees and even has a few birds chirping in the branches of the trees. As soon as the building clicks into the ground, the corpse above me collapses. When the police find me, I try to call out that I can't move any part of my body. The sheriff takes one whiff and almost gags. I hear him shout into the distant breeze at another police officer. I can't hear much with my eardrums damaged but I do hear dead bodies and I think they must be talking about him. But he said, bodies. Another hour passes and a CSI van pulls up and begins taking pictures of me. I try to scream, tell them to stop. I'm alive! But they keep taking pictures and placing little yellow tabs around the ground and ambulance arrives. And I lay here as they zip him up in a body bag. I never knew his name. I didn't mean to kill him, but they promised. Maybe I can tell the cops what happened, they won't believe me. As strangers in hazmat suits carry the body bag towards the ambulance, I see another team approach me. They're also carrying a body bag.  They don't bother ever checking. The worst part is, even though they told me to never tell anybody about this, I showed my son the paper, he's going to follow in my footsteps, and there's nothing I can do to stop him. I sat in the cafeteria reading my book. I was by myself and thankful for a little silence. Across from me sat a table of popular girls, Sadie Hudson was at the head of the group. She towered over the other girls, and her light brown hair pulled into a tight ponytail. She laughed loudly and cupped her hands to whisper into a friend's ear while staring at me. I took my book and began to make my way to another table. What are you reading?  Nothing that would interest you. She snatched the book out of my hands. The vampire-less stat, said Sadie. I bet she dreams of having a vampire lover. Don't you, Val? Said another girl with dark hair. Before I could say anything, she flipped her the pages and began reading the more lurid passages to the table.  I raised an eyebrow. I didn't even think you could read, I said softly. Whispered the dark-haired girl. The bell rang and I looked around the cafeteria for staff. There was no one there just to see us students heading out. Sadie and the other girls glaring at me. I grabbed my backpack and made it toward the exit. We're not done with you, Slut, said Sadie. What's up, Dracula's daughter, said Sadie's boyfriend, Robbie. He was on some sports team at school. I forgot which one. Nothing.   I'll make sure you regret it, he said. You just threatened me with the salt, I said. I'm going to report this. My dad's a cop. It's not going to stick. I can make you disappear and no one will question us, said the young man by Sadie's side. I sprinted to my next class, looking behind me to see if they were following. Thankfully they weren't. I was slightly out of breath as I sat down on my usual desk and unpacked my bag. The whole class was staring at me as I pulled out my history book to study. Mr. Russo patted up to me slowly. Um, Miss Valerie? Are you alright? He said under his breath. I'm fine, just running a little late, sir. It won't happen again, I assure you. Valerie, you're crying if you want to see the counselor. No one listens to me, sir. I need to focus on my GPA, and it's the only thing that will get me out of here. He sighed and lowered his eyes. Miss Valerie, I'm going to write you a note to go to the nurse's office to clean up. I took the note and went to the nurse's office.  Wanda, the school nurse, was a kindly lady in a light pink sweater and salt and pepper hair. Are you sure you don't want to see the principal or guidance counselor? They just twisted up around me until I looked like the instigator. It's not worth it, I said. Sadie Hudson? How did you know? You wouldn't be the first girl that ended up here because of her.  Just because her boyfriend is the sheriff's son doesn't mean she can walk over everybody. I'm getting my GED and attending a community college. I'm already taking advanced placement courses. There wouldn't be much difference, I said. Why don't you take the rest of the day off? I'll write you a hall pass. You have near-perfect attendance. I don't think going home early once will hurt your record. Thank you. I took the pass from her and headed out to my car since I was leaving early. The halls were blessedly empty. Winding mountain roads and deep forests surrounded me as I drove home. The woods parted to the town of Junction. It was a tiny village with a few houses, a gas station and a post office. At the end of the community lay ruins of an old ironworks from the 1800s. A brick structure was twisting into a cave at the foot of the mountain pass. There were rumors of a bad fire nearly a century ago that left the factory in ruin. I drove down the long driveway to my family's house. It was a decent-sized cabin with a wooded yard. I carefully opened the front door and slipped inside. My parents wouldn't work and my sister wouldn't be home for the next few hours, so I had the house to myself. Under my bed were books I hid from my parents. My family was staunch Baptist. I didn't want to hear the arguments from them. I already had enough drama about how I dressed, let alone the lectures I would receive for practicing witchcraft. I had books on spells, demonology and the occult as well as wicca, paganism, Buddhism and the voodoon. I rummaged around and found the book I needed. Protection and Reversal Magic. Flipping through the pages I found a spell on building a ward of protection. I didn't want to hurt Sadie, but I wasn't going to be a victim either.  After studying I went to bed and woke up late at night. I gathered the spell book in a small bag packed with chalk, a few tiny candles and scents of lighter and salt.  I crept out of the cabin into the night. The road was empty as I walked to the old ironworks. I wanted someplace private that could cast my spell and move on with my life. Perhaps I would even free a spirit or two that was trapped there. In the middle of the factory was a crumbling brick with a chimney reaching toward the stars. In the middle of the ruins stood Sadie.  Robbie stood behind her. His eyes were black too. His shadow was inky and angular. Too angular to be human. I could only catch a glimpse of it before it disappeared. Only to return to the opposite wall. A black shadow with jagged angles and tendrils. This was some demon, some monstrous entity that had corrupted Sadie and Robbie.  I want her to pay in blood, said Sadie. The book was heavy in my hands. I had the knowledge to do something about this. And I was here fully armed against it. I could lose horribly and be the creature's mercy. The olive wand trembled in my hands. I fumbled to find a page with an exorcism spell and found nothing. I would have to improvise.  It was now or never. I grabbed a handful of salt and flung it into the shadow. Sadie and her boyfriend recoiled and made a hissing sound. Smoke coiled black as the shadow itself. I brandished my wand. I cast the out by the name of the elements. Air, fire, earth, and water. The creature hissed again and back slowly away. I cast the out of thine host and among roots of the earth. I flung more salt. Sadie screamed and recoiled. Robbie grabbed me, his hands squeezing my throat. My vision darkened. Down and out amongst the stones and roots, I screamed enchanted over and over. A loud and human shriek cracked through the darkness. A force yanked Robbie away from my neck and clear across the floor. He lay limply. I got up and coughed hard, catching my breath. My throat burned and my neck felt bruised. I went over to Sadie and grabbed her arm. Come on, we have to run. She nodded and got up. She ran so fast that she pulled me behind her. Gravel still had beneath me as I hitched up my long black robe to run faster. The inky shadow was further and further behind us. We made it back to my cabin. It's safe in here, but I need you to be quiet, I said.  Asked Sadie. Tears were streaming down her eyes and her nose was running. I don't know. An exorcism, I think. Just go in. I carefully locked the door to my house. We walked upstairs quickly and silently. Once in my bedroom, I threw down a line of salt lining the entrance. This is my abode, a cate, protected from darkness and spirits unknown. I chanted as I held my wand against the door. I felt pressure and then the room felt brighter and lighter. Sadie stared at me, her jaw gape. We're safe here, I said, deflating to the floor. What was that thing, Sadie asked? I don't know. Whatever it was, it isn't good. It has Robbie, you have to go and help him, please. We're lucky we made it out alive. I don't think I can fight that thing. You have to try. Her face was bright red and her nose was running.  I can build up a way to banish it for good. She started to tremble and I sat by her. She put an arm around me and began to sob. Val, I'm sorry for how I treated you. It wasn't you, it wasn't even a person, I sighed. Don't you worry, I'll find some way out of this. I let Sadie sleep on my bed as I studied my books for a solution. In my demonology book, I found a small section on exorcisms. The chapter warned against trying such a feat without years of training or alone. The demons and evil creatures hated strong will and faith. It didn't specify a religion. Hell and atheists only needed enough confidence in themselves to do one. Then again, an atheist wouldn't believe any of this was happening to begin with and try to find a rational explanation. Even with faith, it was perilous. I didn't know any other occultist, at least not outside of small internet circles. I couldn't go to our family pastor without adding myself as a witch. Once again, I was on my own with this. We walked into school the next day. The halls were silent. People stared at Sadie and I. Cup tans whispered into ears. She parted from me and I went to my morning class. At lunch, I noticed Sadie sitting alone. Tears running down her face. I sat next to her. It's still controlling him. She sobbed, barely above a whisper. I looked over to the next table and Robbie was there with a pack of popular girls. The dark-haired girl twined around his arm. Inky, angular shadows surrounded the group. Looks like our little Satanist has found a lesbian lover, she smirked. They all broke out in a tittering laughter. Leave us alone, said Sadie. Or what? You leave me behind to make out with a witch? Said Robbie. Shhh. I said it in my breath. Remember, it's not them. You have to fight them, Sadie whispered. Not in public. I'll go back to the ruins tonight to see if it comes back. Sadie nodded. Her shoulder shook. Her eyes were red and swollen by tears. I'd had years to build up a thick skin to being bullied and being laughed at and alone. I focused on my schoolwork all these years and built a wall of sarcasm to protect me. Robbie, you're just upset because your girlfriend thinks I'm better in bed, I smirked. Maybe try being less vanilla. I'm sorry you're all bigoted homophobes. You'll have to greet all types in your future Wal-Mart careers. The bell rang. I wish I could have brought Sadie to my AP classes with me. At least the students there were mature enough to keep opinions to themselves. I walked to the guidance counselor's office and asked for programs on independent study or an early transfer to community college. After school, I went to the parking lot to find the tires of my car slashed. I went back to the principal's office and made a report. The police were called including Sheriff Collins, Robbie's dad. My stomach dropped and I knew this would go nowhere. I would have to report it to my insurance and wait for the claim to settle. I can give you a ride home. I turned around and saw Sadie. Her curly caramel hair was disheveled and her eyes looked red and tired. Thank you, I'm sorry about today, I said. How do you live with it? She asked. How can you stand how people treat you? With a lot of sarcasm and condescension, I said. I know you don't want to hear this, but you get used to it after a while. You learn not to trust people either. Even I have bad days where I break down. I was planning to leave school, not drop out, but graduate early.  I never want to see this town again. She burst into another round of tears. I'm so sorry for the way I treated you. It wasn't you, I said. It was that, that thing may have been on me, but it didn't have complete control. It would whisper to me. It would tell me such mean things. But it didn't make me say anything. I could have ignored it. Okay, okay, I forgive you, I said. Right now I just want to go home.  We drove in silence to my house in the woods. Look, I'm going to go to the ruins tonight and try to fight this thing, I said. She nodded.  I need you there as backup. I'm scared, I have no idea what I'm doing. Look, you're the witch. I mean, you have magical powers or something. It's a freight of faith, I said. Bring a cross or star of David, a pentagram or crystal or a lucky sock, whatever you believe. I'll do most of the work, but I need someone else there. She took a deep breath and nodded again. I'll see what I can do. I tried to keep my mind off of the night ahead by studying. I worked on a term paper for a few hours, going to the kitchen to grab some leftovers. My parents engrossed in reality TVs. I told them about my car and that I reported to the insurance. My father said he would call a tow truck in the morning and continue to watch TV. I gathered my materials, a bag of salt, my olive wand, and some spring water that I left in the moonlight. It wasn't holy water in the traditional sense, but it was the best that I had.   After my parents went to bed, I left the house quietly. The full moon shone overhead, casting blue light on the gravel road towards the ruins. Wood creaked under my feet as I entered the crumbling structure. Sadie? I called out softly. I saw a body hanging limply from one of the brick pillars in the silver light. It was Sadie. Her curls dangled over her face, and her eyes were still open. Poor girl. It seemed she wasn't strong enough to handle ridicule. A raspy voice whispered in the darkness. She's not strong.  Down amongst the trees and out upon the roots, I shouted. I saw Robbie as he flinched and moved back, fumbling with the bottle. I splashed all the holy water into his face. Steam poured off of his shadow and he wailed in pain. Down amongst the trees and out under the roots, leave.  Robbie hissed and shuddered a bit. The dark, angular shadow began to lift from him. I pushed every bit of energy and will through my olive wand. Be gone. Another shudder. Dizzyness struck me, and my legs felt limp. I took a deep breath. By Gaia, Hecate Brigette. By fire, earth, air, and water. By moon, sun, earth, and stars. I order you to get out. The shadow made a ripping sound, and Robbie screamed. Then there was disturbing laughter. That was a valiant attempt, a little witch, said Robbie. I haven't fought anyone that came close to beating me. Because you amused me, I'll let you live. My mouth fell open. There have been others before you. All the chance with the power of Christ compels you, he laughed. None of it even came close to you. I think our dear Reverend only cares about the collection plate. He smiled wistfully.  Face ridicule and cruelty every day, and have more faith in yourself than he does. This is very amusing, and I respect you for that. Be gone, I yelled. Robbie chuckled and put his finger over my lips. You won't speak about this to anybody. I'll report Sadie is a suicide, nothing to do with you. The mean girls will get blamed for bullying her. You'll go on to get excellent grades and graduate early. You'll leave this town altogether, and not look back. I went to cast again. But my lips were sealed shut. My tongue felt like a stone in my mouth. The thing is, y'all have it wrong. Y'all have it wrong. You're trying to cast some demon or evil spirit out of me. Thinking it'll save me. He shook his head and smiled. I don't hold host to a demon, sweetie. I am the demon.  You are what you are.  Just as you can't cast my soul out of my own body. I wanted to scream at him, to take down this monster hidden in the flesh. But I couldn't break whatever silence he threw on me.  The next day at school, the mean girls were all in tears. Sadie's suicide was all over the local news. And there were grief counselors. There was an assembly about bullying and planned a memorial service. People that I never even knew said their apologies for the way they treated me. Some also asked me to tutor them. I wanted to scream out, to tell the police the truth about what happened. Every time I went to say something my mouth sealed shut, and my tongue felt leaden. Robbie walked by, putting his finger over his lips and smiled. I wanted to punch his teeth out, but I had no other choice than to swallow my rage. The rest of the year went smoothly. I graduated early and enrolled at State University. I made friends that had similar interests and accepted me for who I was. There was some tension with my family, but I could finally be myself. I moved forward with my life and didn't much think of the town or high school. Years later, I was getting ready for work and watching the news. Robert Collins was running for governor, and his number showed me he was winning. I saw dark, angular shadows looming around him. Blank, soulless eyes stared right at me through the camera. Monsters never go away. They get elected.


Hello, in this video, we're going to take a look at the reading settings. So as you will see, starting at my dashboard, go over to settings and then select reading. Now like with the writing settings, some of this will make a little more sense once you've watched the posts and pages video, but posts and pages videos, but we'll cover this here and then again you may want to return to this later. So we're starting with here the front page displays and the default here is going to be your latest posts. We would like to encourage you to keep this as is. Now, however, you do have an option to changing it to a static page. So let me explain what the difference is. When you leave it at the default, your latest posts, that means your homepage is the blog. So when people come to the website, they see the current information that you're posting to your website in the form of the blog and then they can access all of the other static information that they want to. But the idea behind this is that you always have new fresh information say at least once a week up at the top center of your webpage with older information moving down as you add new information at the top and then people can get to the older information through the archives and get to all the pages through the menu that you will be setting up on your site. The other option and some websites do this is you can change it to a static page as your homepage so that when people come to your website, they always see the exact same page. Something like a welcome to the library, here's what we're about. And then they can click on a link to go see that current new content in the form of the blog. So you can do this. We don't recommend it. We really would like you to keep your website as a blog centric so that that new information is always showing up. However, like I said, the option is yours. And if you'd like to talk to me more about it, you know, just drop me a line and we can have a conversation about it. The next one down here is blog pages show it most 10 posts and you can change this to 10 a higher number or a lower number through these arrow keys. This is going to say how many posts at any one time will show up on a single blog page. So what this is saying here is the 10 most recent posts will appear and then to see older posts, you will need to go into the archive or to a next page. Now depending on how long your posts generally are, 10 could be a lot. If you write a lot of essays, you might want to lower this number. If you post a lot of short pieces of information, you might want to raise this number. But 10 is a good place to start and I recommend leaving it there and then you can come back and always change it later. Our next option is syndication feeds show the most recent and again, 10 items is the default and you can raise this or lower this. This is if people subscribe to your blog content via RSS, don't worry, you don't have to necessarily understand that but it is built into WordPress and when somebody first subscribes how many items, how many of the last items do you want them to see and the default is 10 and I think that's a good place to leave it. For each article in a feed, do you want to show the full text or the summary? You'll notice here full text is the default, we recommend you leave it there. Basically is so again, if somebody subscribes to your content via RSS, when they get a new item, are they going to get the whole blog post or are they going to get part of the blog post and then they have to click and go to your website to read the rest of it. I do realize that that summary where they have to click and come to your website sounds really tempting but that will annoy a lot of readers. Most readers are going to want to get the whole article and then they can come to your website if they want to. Again, your call recommendation though, leave it at full text. This last one is search engine visibility and in other words, if you check this, you are basically telling Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, please don't index my content. You want to leave this alone. Do not check this box. That way people will be able to find you if they do a Google search. That's all that's here. You've got a couple of options. We generally recommend that you leave all these things as the default but like I said, you can change it as your site. As with all the settings pages, there's a save changes at the bottom. If you made any changes, go ahead and click save changes to make sure those changes are kept or if you haven't made any changes, you can just leave this page alone and move on to the next thing. Thanks for watching.


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There's actually a lot of news to get to today, but I am going to start off At least for this video talking about MBA 2k 18 on Nintendo switch So we know that MBA 2k 18 is coming to switch We know that for some reason the digital version is going to be there at launch But now we know the physical version isn't releasing till October 17th Really strange that there's that discrepancy that whole month and two-day wait for the physical version Not really sure why they still haven't given an official explanation All of this is announced when it's coming and remind people that you can buy digitally on the 15th But whatever that that's that that's an aside to what I want to talk about today because MBA 2k 18 on Nintendo switch was playable at an event from like yesterday. I believe the event took place yesterday and Now that we have some people who have gone hands-on with it We've learned some new things about it and let me just explain the general Gist of what we now know based on the information. I was able to look up all over the internet All right, so first I'm reading this news right off of Nintendo everything calm I'll put a link down in the description It says 2k sports and visual comms sense seem to be treating the switch version of MBA 2k 18 Well folks are starting to go hands-on with the game Including us gamer and we're hearing that it's feature complete and will be identical to the PlayStation 4 version And we're talking about in terms of feature set MBA 2k 18 players on switch can expect the inclusion of the my GM team management My league my career story mode and everything else and it's using the exact same engine across all platforms Amiibo support is also officially confirmed However the specifics on how that works are being kept under wraps The only element missing in the switch version of nba 2k 18 is the ability to create a custom logo for pro am teams The same my player story is included as the other versions as well As far as graphics go the animation and AI are also the same across all platforms Developer visual concepts apparently pushed the switch and its memory to its absolute limits The team considered whether or not to use the same engine with switch But they're glad they went in that direction in addition neogap was able to do some additional snooping And it turns out that the game runs at 720p Well docked obviously we already know that that's exactly what it runs at when it's undocked But it runs at 30 FPS docked and undocked Which is half of the FPS that it does get on PlayStation 4 and Xbox one where it runs at 60 FPS and nba 2k Has been running at 60 FPS. I almost I think since the beginning of the 2k series. I'm not sure So that is a bit of a bummer, but you know there has to be a sacrifice, right? And this is where I've been critical of EA and I know some people Are just fine with FIFA 18 the way it looks on switch and having missing features and Maybe even nodding their head in agreement with the excuse that they didn't want to make what looks like a worse version of a Current gen game, which it still looks like a worse version of a current gen game I'm sorry. It just does and I don't actually think that's a problem to be honest Which is why I think that excuse is stupid, but it's very interesting because I'll put up some footage here and this footage comes from youtuber mobile 0 1. I'm assuming they were at the event And this is the only footage like the very clear footage we have of it. Yes, it is off-screen As you can tell there's no direct feed footage direct feed footage was not allowed to be recorded at the event So you're gonna have to wait till people have review copies in their hands or until the game releases on the 15th If you want to see more direct feed, but it looks good Just based on this little 1 minute 28 second clip. It looks solid We're seeing Golden State against Cleveland Cavaliers. No surprise rematch of the finals And I got to say the animations look great The passing looks great. There doesn't seem to be any stuttering. So while it is 30 FPS It doesn't seem to be dipping. So it must be a locked 30 FPS And it would have been interesting to see if they would have unlocked the FPS if it could have went higher than 30 Even if it can only get into the 40s that might have been preferable for some people But yeah, it looks good. Now what it looks like on a big screen. I don't know We have some footage of it on a big screen, but there's no games So the footage that's out there is like the NBA Playgrounds open like like open world aspect to add it to this game, which is included with switch But see this is that what I'm talking about when it comes to third-party support on switch now I'm getting NBA 2k 18 I'm a huge NBA fan and the fact it's coming to switch and has all the features I'm you know, I have an Xbox one. I could get it for that which it will run at 30 FPS But I also get to take it with me on the go that to me is a huge selling point for me to get NBA 2k 18 on switch and such I'm going to get it and It's interesting because I I'm always an advocate for FPS I think FPS is more important than visuals and I think for the sake of NBA 2k 18 Personally, I wouldn't mind it if they downgraded the visuals in order to hit 60 FPS. However, I Understand that the better games look the better they're going to sell and I'm also somebody who While I don't like games being 30 FPS and rather they be 60 FPS or higher I don't also think that 30 FPS is some unplayable mess like some other people do so I actually you know Watching this video. I think that's perfectly playable perfectly acceptable perfectly. Okay, I would prefer 60 But I'm okay at 30 especially with the portable aspect and I got to say For selling reasons, you know the reason that visuals fidelity is often put ahead of frame rate is because it sells better and Visually, this looks good now granted. This is just a portable mode. It's not going to look as good Let me just say this right now It's not gonna look as good as the PlayStation 4 and Xbox one versions when the comparisons come out and the videos come out It's not going to look as good But I think it's going to be surprising how well it actually looks and the important part is the gameplay is intact So while it is half the frame rate all the animations are the same all the features are the same the game plays the same That's the important part even if it's not as silky smooth So I I'm just really happy and this is the kind of treatment. I think I want You know, I can't say for sure till I play it, but I'm pretty sure this is the treatment I want third parties to do on switch We have to realize that for any multi-platform game that's on PlayStation 4 and Xbox one and PC that comes to switch Unless it's an indie title, there's probably going to have to be sacrifice somewhere whether it's resolution whether it's frame rate Whether it's graphic fidelity draw distance anti-aliasing all the stuff There's going to be Sacrifices to bring it to switch because switch is not as powerful as an Xbox one and a PlayStation 4 and gaming PCs That's just reality. It's not but the fact that 2k literally put their best foot forward This is not like a half-arsed port here. See the 2k they brought to We you felt a little, you know half cocked as it were and here we're getting what is definitely a 100% true-to-form NBA 2k 18 experience on Nintendo switch. This is what I want people to do. I want Call of Duty. I want you know Mass Effect and Assassin's Creed Origins I want all these games to come to switch and do it in a way where they understand There's going to be sacrifices and I think for me as a switch owner I'm okay with those sacrifices because the big bonus you get with switch over any other version of the game is the ease of portability between using it on my TV and taking it with me on the go and If it's a feature complete game that has the same gameplay with nothing cut from it like you know like NBA 2k 18 But the visuals have to be downgraded or for some reason, you know not for some reason We understand why the FPS has to be cut from 60 to 30. I'm okay with that. I don't actually think that's a problem so it's very good news to me that this is happening and I hope that all the third parties take note. I hope that Even if FIFA tanks, let's say FIFA 18 does not sell well, but NBA 2k 18 does I hope EA doesn't give up on the switch. They look at what 2k didn't be like, okay It was the wrong decision We should have went with frostbite and we should have even if we had to cut the frame rate on it down to 30 We couldn't enhance the visuals to a point where it looks pretty close to the Xbox one And at that point people are gonna love that thing on the go because everyone knows there has to be Sacrifices for it to be on the go and it's all about what you want to sacrifice What's going to sell and obviously visuals NBA 2k 18 that looks almost as good as the PlayStation 4 and Xbox one version is going to sell better than one that doesn't even if it Runs at a higher frame rate frame rates Unfortunately, do not sell copies of video games to the general mass and NBA 2k 18 has an appeal to general consumers of the NBA So they have to worry about visual fidelity above frame rate, but yeah, I'm excited I think this is the future of Third-party support on the switch. I don't care. You know, I want an Xbox one X. I want a PlayStation 4 pro I have a high end or a higher end gaming PC and only the GTX 1070 I would love to get a 1080 ti in there eventually, but I'm pretty pleased or even a Vega 64 to be honest I'm always liked AMD anyways, but I I love what they're doing But at the same time, I hope other third parties are taking note because if other third parties can see what they're doing and NBA 2k 18 becomes a big success on switch. That is the path I think to future third-party support the fact that NBA 2k 18 can look this good play this smooth Be feature complete and use a current gen engine. That tells me. I'm sorry. The excuses everyone gives is just they don't want to put in the effort That's it. So any time I hear a third party say we can't do it because of Our engine doesn't fully support the switch or this or that or visual this or whatever a frame rate that all I'm gonna say is NBA 2k 18 Done stop arguing put in the effort Yes, thank you NBA 2k 18. Thank you 2k. Thank you the other developers that are behind the switch version specifically, which is visual concepts Thank you so much for putting your 100% effort into a switch version of a game not a half-arsed port I am so thrilled right now. I the man Be that bastion 2k. I'm so happy. Oh, by the way 2k tell rockstar. We want their games, too Anyways, folks, I am the Fender of a dance from Nintendo Prime if you like this video You know what to do and if you just like this video hit that dislike button Subscribe for more and as always I will catch you in the next one


and so I'm walking in Old Delhi which is the Muslim part and around it is this like bustling marketplace and as I was passing by I'm hearing a koali so I turned around with the noise and I look around and there is a poor man with Down syndrome sitting in the dust and he was absolutely lost in the words of that koali the koal was saying and I'm not a koali singer he said he was saying that the night of the ascension of the prophet is a mubarak night this man with Down syndrome he's completely involved in just engrossed in it it's like the entire world does not matter to him there's so much going on anyone can just hit you step over you and he's just in another world that was such a time-stopping experience for me


You are here. Here you are. Welcome to WordCAP. I'm so excited to be here. Now the question I have for you today is, do you feel like you are where you should be or where you want to be right now? A lot of times when we think about success, and I consider myself to be a fairly ambitious woman, we tend to think of success as being kind of somewhere over there and not exactly where we are right now. And a lot of times when we think about success, we see it as going from point A where we are right now to point B where we want to go. And raise your hand if you feel like you've ever had this goal or this big dream of yours. Maybe it was in business or building a new website on WordPress, and you said, okay, I'm just gonna do this. It's gonna be straightforward, one, two steps, and there you were. Raise your hand if it was that easy. Okay, so we're all in agreement here that sometimes getting to where we want to go is not the most straightforward path. But at the same time, I feel like there is so much learning that happens along the way, and that's what I'm here to talk about today. When I was growing up, we were in a two-story home, and we had this spiral staircase, and at the time, you know, I was just a little kid learning how to crawl and climb, and I was climbing around this spiral staircase, and my mom was a little bit worried because the way this was set up, it wasn't like a straightforward staircase where you have a banister and you have a wall, and there's no way to fall down the stairs on the sides. This spiral staircase actually had a space where you could fall over at every single step. So as you can imagine, my mom was a little bit worried when I was learning how to climb those stairs, but I would just look up at the staircase and see the top, and I just loved kind of climbing those stairs. Now at the time, that didn't really, you know, mean much in my life, but now looking back, I know that that staircase and the analogy that it has in my life in my business was going to be everything. So I first started making websites when I was 12 years old. I still remember getting our first computer that was hooked up to the Internet, and I was so pumped. I didn't even realize I could make my own websites, but as soon as I did, I was on it. The first few websites I built were all about cartoons, and it was awesome, because I could connect with other young teenagers just like myself who were also interested in cartoons. So back then, it was all HTML coding and notepad. There was no WordPress at the time, and there was a lot of learning involved. Now fast forward a couple more years. I'm in high school and one of my teachers asks me if I would design him a business card for his side business. Sure, I said I was so excited. I just love being creative, and I'm like, okay, I'm all in, let's do it. So that weekend, I worked extra hard on this business card design, and I would send it to him for feedback, and he would reply by email, and it was like, wow, this is the best thing that's ever happened to me. And so on Monday morning, I was so excited to go into my class and hand in the final business card and see what would happen and how much he liked it. Well, this is interesting. My teacher was not really interested in paying me for my work. So at this point, I didn't quite know what to do, and because he was my chemistry teacher, and chemistry was not my very favorite subject, I didn't want to put up a big fight about it or make any big fuss, so no problem. I just stayed quiet, and university applications were coming up. I figured, okay, maybe this will pay off in some other way, who knows. So I just kept quiet, but a couple of weeks later, that teacher had gone on to speak to our principal and some of the other members of my school committee, and they asked me and another student to design our school's website. In fact, we got written up all over the town and on our school newsletter as being these website wizards where we designed the school's website. And to be perfectly honest, this was not an easy job because it had a ton of pages. Again, there was no WordPress yet, so we did a lot of hand coding and a lot of hand designing for that project, and it took us months to make it happen. So after it was all said and done, we finally got paid for the project, which felt amazing.  So again, I was kind of like, huh, all right, this is not the best experience ever. And to be perfectly honest, they kept the website up way too long after I graduated. But fast forward a couple more years, and now I'm going to university and I'm studying software engineering. This is the very hardcore, low-level programming stuff that I never had to touch when I was doing websites. So this is a whole different ballgame. I was studying with 100 men and 10 women, and there's a lot of programming going on. Luckily, though, we had some great internship opportunities, and I got to go work on Wall Street as an intern in Silicon Valley at some startups. And I got to learn a ton about development, software design, specifications, testing, and all kinds of really deep and interesting stuff. Now, when it came time to graduate, I was really lucky because I had a job offer to go work on Wall Street. And everything in my life up to this point was leading to that direction. And I remember being on Wall Street and having worked there and having seen everybody's lifestyle. It was very busy, very hectic, a lot of stress.  So everybody in my life at this point was so excited. They were like, Natalie, you have this great opportunity. My parents were like, you've been working so hard your whole life to get to this point, such an awesome opportunity. They're going to move you to New York. And by the way, I'm from a really small town in Canada, so that was a huge deal. And all of my peers were going off to their jobs at Google and Facebook and on Wall Street. And I was like, okay, you know, everybody's on this kind of treadmill path, but I'm not feeling called. So I took a step back and I said, okay, I'm going to listen to that deep voice inside that's saying that's not for me. And I'm going to start my first business. So that's exactly what I did. I turned down that big, fancy job offer on Wall Street and I started my business right out of college. And as you'll see, there's a bit of a recurring theme here because I was still interested in cartoons. But this time, the way I did it was following my passion. So at that point, I had been reading a lot of WordPress blogs about business and following your passion. And I definitely feel like that had planted the seed for me around what I wanted to do with my business. So this time I kind of felt like, okay, you know, I didn't have such a great experience in the tech space. Maybe I should just throw that all away and follow my passion, which was all about healthy eating and nutrition. So I did that and I started my blog. I built my own website on WordPress. I designed everything and things started to pick up speed. It was also a bit of a training ground because I didn't know anything about business. So I learned how to market myself, how to actually, you know, sell things online and how to actually run a business. And what ended up happening is that people kept coming up to me and saying, Natalie, who built your website? And how are you making money and how are you marketing yourself and how is this actually a business? So for a really long time, I actually resisted all of those people who were coming up to me and I was like, no, I don't do tech stuff. I'm sorry, I am purely in the nutrition space. Even though I was all self-taught in nutrition and I had a ton of training in the tech space. So eventually I decided, you know, if people kept coming up to me and maybe there is something here and I should pay attention. So I opened up my shingle and as soon as I said, okay, I'll design websites for people on WordPress, that quickly turned into a six-figure business. And I was like, okay, clearly there's something here. Maybe I should keep going in this way. So that's exactly what I did. And this time I had traveled back onto this spiral staircase and I kind of felt like I was back to square one. Because when I had done websites in high school, obviously I didn't have as much experience as I did now because this time I had run my own business. I could see things from a different perspective and I had a lot more experience charging for what I was doing and that was made all the difference. So if ever you felt in your life where you've gone back to square one or like this isn't exactly where you thought you would be, the good thing about the spiral staircase analogy is that you will revisit things in your life, but the good thing is that every time you do, you're coming at it from a different perspective higher up on the spiral. So you're bringing all these awesome experiences in your life that you can use and implement to do even better, even if it feels like it's the same old thing. So at this point, I knew that I was on to the next level of my spiral staircase. Now things started to pick up very quickly in my web design business. In fact, I had to hire other developers and collaborate with other designers and I just couldn't really handle things on my own anymore. And at this point, I had so many clients that I had basically become a full-time project manager. Has anybody been here before? Yeah, a couple of people raising their hands. Yeah, so I realized, okay, I started this business, I have a lot going for me, things are picking up speed, but it's not exactly what I wanted to build. So I took another step back and I said, okay, what can I do differently and what is there that I could offer that's maybe a little bit less project management intensive? And that's around the same time people started coming to me and asking for consulting services and asking for my advice on their websites and their projects and their digital strategy. So one of the first clients I took on as a consultant client was Andrea Nakayama. She's a holistic nutritionist coach and she's mostly in the functional nutrition space. And at the time, her business was growing, it was kind of ramping up steam as well. And what we did is we put together a launch for a new program called Holistic Nutrition Lab. She made $139,000, and it not only made her a ton of money in her business, but it also helped position her as the expert that she was in her field, and it doubled her email list. So after I realized, wow, okay, I have a lot that I can offer here, maybe there's actually some value in consulting too. So I kind of phased out of the web design and I started taking on more consulting clients. So at this point, again, things were starting to change and shift gear and every single time I felt like I was taking a step around the spiral staircase and I was adding more expertise and all kinds of good stuff to my business skills. Now the reason I was able to have such a great effect on my consulting clients is because I had been behind the scenes on so many of my web clients' businesses. So I never could have gotten to those consulting gigs without having been through the web design phase. And that's what I really love about the spiral staircase is that every single step that you take is going to help you go forward and do even more amazing things. Now there's a couple of things that I've learned on the spiral staircase and it's really easy to look back to your spiral staircase and find the patterns. It's a lot harder looking forward to see exactly how things are going to come together in the big vision of your place you want to go to, but there are some things I want to share about what I've learned along my path that will hopefully help you today. So there are three things that I've found that we all do when we're traveling across the spiral staircase. So the first one is tuning in, the second one is teaming up, and the third one is taking off. All right, so let's talk about tuning in. So just like when I was faced with this decision point to decide whether I went the Wall Street path or started my own business, there was a point where I had to stop listening to all the outside voices and start trusting what was deep inside of me. And I think it's really hard, especially in our hyper-connected digital world, to quiet all the outside noise and really listen to what's going on inside. Especially with all the amazing blogs, all the amazing content, videos, you know, Instagram, YouTube, you name it, there's all kinds of stuff coming at us all the time. So to me, being able to tune in is not only a great skill to have, it's necessary.  And I think that's pretty much happened to all of us at one point or another, where we feel like success has to look a specific way or we're building our lives around somebody else's version of success and, you know, goodness in life. So it really starts with trusting that inner knowing that you have inside of you. And even though it feels uncomfortable, so if you felt like, okay, I've had this inkling, how do I know if it's fear or how do I know if it's something telling me to do this? Because a lot of times you will have times where it's really uncomfortable to make that tough decision to say no to something or to say yes to something else. So I'm going to share with you some of the ways that I've used to really know what's right and what's just kind of a distraction. Now, who here considers themselves to be a bit of an introvert? Just raise your hand. All right, so my people. I love it. Great. So I think that all of us as introverts, and if you're not an introvert, that's okay. But I feel like we all have a very rich inner world. We have these amazing imaginations. We have tons of ideas. And we basically kind of live by ourselves in our own little worlds.  Because I really feel like that's what people are missing.  I didn't have a ton of client work. And I said, okay, what could I do to move my business forward right now? And without necessarily focusing on making more money. So what I thought was, okay, I know that if I wanted to build my list more, that would actually help build my business faster. So I decided to set aside a whole month where all I would do is focus on building my email list in my audience. So what I put together was called the 30-day list building challenge. And it was a totally free challenge. It was really just a challenge to myself originally to go from 15,000 people on my email list to 30,000 in a month. So it was being pretty ambitious there. But I decided, okay, I'm going to issue this challenge. And if other people want to join me, they're welcome to do so. And what I did is I sent out some emails, I recorded some videos, and I really shared my journey of building my list during those 30 days. Now the interesting thing was, you know, I did not double my list in 30 days. That was pretty ambitious. But what I did do is connect with people to build their list faster. And what they told me was they loved the idea, but they wanted more. They wanted me to do a daily video and a daily email. I said, okay, no problem, I can do that. So we re-ramped the program up. And again, this was totally free. And we put it together. And it was a 30-day challenge, one video a day, with all the steps that I used to build my list faster. And that literally took off by itself. And since then, we've more than tripled our email list. And I can definitely account much of that success to the 30-day challenge. And all of that came from listening to that little voice deep inside of me that was saying, you know what, if you don't have to worry about making money, maybe you should focus on building your list and connecting with more people. And then also balancing that with what other people wanted as well. So a lot of times, you know, you could say, okay, I want to become a basket weaver. But if nobody's buying baskets, it doesn't really matter, right? And so it's the same when it comes to business. And, you know, anything that you're doing on WordPress, you need to really figure out what's coming from deep inside of you, but also make sure that there's a market for it and there's people who want what you've got. So this is kind of where it comes into being able to have your own volition, your own ideas, and your own creativity, but also make sure that it's not going to be met by crickets. All right, so now I want you to ask yourself, how can you carve out time each and every week to tune into what's most important to you? Now when I say that, I don't mean that you have to start meditating or journaling or any of that stuff. In fact, it might be putting on some tunes in your office in the middle of the day and just rocking it out and just kind of moving your body. It could be going for a jog, taking a yoga class, whatever it is for you. Moving your body and really connecting to your body, in my opinion, is one of the best ways you can really tune into what's important and what's meaningful in your life. And one of the things that I found is that without meaning, it's really hard to keep going, no matter what it is that you're doing, and you'll probably not end up at your A to B position that you want to get in terms of success. And I have to tell you that in terms of meaning, I did not find a whole lot of it on Wall Street, but I have found a lot of it in my business working with incredible clients, and that's exactly what I want for you too. All right, let's talk about teaming up. So this is a picture of my husband and I, Robin Lee, on our wedding day, and we're frolicking in the fields. And so the reason I'm bringing up Robin is because recently, just about a year and a half ago, he was working really hard. We lived in New York City, and my business was starting to ramp up again and again. It was continuously growing, and he was burning out. He was working as a management consultant, and he was working crazy hours. I would barely see him.  So why don't you quit your job and join my company? Now, I don't know about you, but I can tell by the chuckles that that is a really tough thing for a man to hear, because a lot of guys, and I don't know if it's necessarily the case anymore today, but there's this feeling that you have to be the breadwinner. There's this feeling that you have to be the person that provides for the family, and Robin definitely had that conditioning and that connection, and I said, we can make it, we can change this paradigm, we can change the way the culture thinks of these things. Why don't you join me and let's create something together? So he did that, and at first we decided to work on a WordPress plugin together, and by the way, so he was doing management consultant, but we met in university, and we were both coders at the time, so that background was there already. So he said, okay, cool, I've done some programming before, I've never done any WordPress stuff, I haven't done it before. So I taught him everything I knew about the website of things, and he decided to work on an internal project, which we know we kind of just used ourselves and we weren't going to show it to the public, because we didn't know how it would turn out. So we started off with building a new membership site plugin for ourselves that we used to house our training programs. So that's what we did, and it worked pretty well, and I'll get back to the story in a quick minute.   If you think of Stonehenge, for example, I can pretty much guarantee, even though I was not there, that it was not just one guy or one gal who put it all up together, right? So I like to say the same for anything that you're doing in your life or in your business or whether it's a web project, having allies and having other people on your team, whether it's literally a team or it's just collaborators, partners, peers, coaches, mentors, clients, all of those are people who are your allies and who are going to team up with you and help you make it even more awesome than it would have been just by yourself. So when it comes to teaming up and having allies, one of the things that I found to be really helpful is to think about this. None of us have got here by ourselves. I didn't get here by myself. There was the pilot on the plane, there was the flight attendants, all the people who made all the airline stuff happen, my Uber driver, and obviously I'm being very funny here, but at the same time, really all the people on my team and my business, all the mentors I've worked with, all of my clients, supporting me and cheering me on, even you guys, we're here because of you and I really feel like that's one of the things we forget, especially as introverts because we don't necessarily like to hang out too much with other people most of the time, even though it is such a big game changer and that's why I'm making such a big point about it here. So I wanted to kind of continue the story of my husband joining our company. So we decided to call our new company Ambition Ally because we're allies both in our life and marriage and also in business in the way that we like to be pretty competitive and ambitious together too. So we started off this company together and we were like, okay, let's kind of go down this plug-in path, we love WordPress, it's what we use for all of our websites and I've got more ideas than we have time to build stuff, so let's just get going. So he finally decided to join the company and we worked on that first internal plug-in together. Things were going great and things really started to pick up speed and I really realized how much we have of this amazing kind of co-creation process. So I tend to have tons of ideas of what we should do, how to market it, who it's for, what features to have and Robin is incredible when it comes to implementation and also support, which is huge, is anybody knows here. So one of the things I realized is that as I was going through my spiral staircase, he had his own spiral staircase too. So thinking about it as a bit of a double helix or DNA, we're both going through our own spiral staircases but they're kind of hooked up together now and I think it's true whether you're talking about your spouse or your family members or anybody else, they're on their path on their spiral staircase just as much as you are and sometimes it's the spiral staircase of a mentor where you're kind of following behind their steps or it's somebody on your team and they have their goals and their dreams of what they want to build in their life so thinking about that is really huge in my opinion because it helps you make better decisions for yourself and to really partner with somebody knowing that they're on their own journey and they're going to continuously improve as well. So I want to go back to how Robin and I met. So we met in college and we had a date where we had bubble tea, I don't know if you guys know that and it was really interesting because he was studying business and math and I was studying software engineering and on our very first date he asked me what do you want to do after you graduate and I just, you know, by then I kind of had already decided that I wanted to start a business so I said well I want to start a business and when I asked him what he wanted to do he was like, you know, I wish I had taken the software engineering program and I was like, well this is very interesting and his first answer or his first recommendation for me to start a business was to go to business school and I said thanks but I think I'll just start it without going to business school and it worked out great and in fact I think that's why we're still happily together and that building a business together has not affected our sex life too much which is great. So we've been able to really kind of use both sides of our skills and our strengths and that's been really helpful as our business continues to grow. That's on Twitter now. That's on Twitter now, perfect. He hates when I do that. I've done that before too. So I just wanted to briefly talk about what we ended up doing is we had that internal project that we had built for ourselves that we had been using behind the scenes on our website and we realized this is kind of too big of a project to launch as our first big thing. So we had had a lot of people over the years ask us how we built those gorgeous opt-ins on our website and what kind of pop-up plug-ins we used and a lot of times my recommendation for these people was going to be to go learn how to program and it's going to take you, you know, a while. If you want it to look really nice it's going to take some finicky, programming in CSS and PHP and all kinds of stuff. So I decided, okay, what if we could take that step out? What if we could have people who are not developers but maybe who have a design eye build their own beautiful gorgeous opt-ins and that's when we came up with Pop-Up Ally and by the way you can say it Ambitionally Pop-Up Ally is supposed to be flexible. So we decided to launch Pop-Up Ally and it had a free version and now we also have a premium version and it's all about the polite pop-up. So for those of you who really hate those annoying pop-ups on websites I'm totally there with you and that's actually why we built this one is because we wanted to have a more polite way to collect email opt-ins without really annoying your existing fans or even, you know, when you want to show it you don't have to show it. So that's the first project that we got and we've got over 10,000 downloads of our free version and tons of incredibly happy full premium versions users as well. Now the next thing we did is we finally packaged up our internal project and we made it available to the web and it's called Access Ally and it's all about making elegant WordPress websites available with membership and with learning and kind of progress and gamification and making all of that really, really fun for online learners. All right, so all that being said I want you to start thinking about where can you partner up and find allies in your life and business and they don't have to be, like I said, you know, somebody that you already know it might be somebody that you meet this weekend it might be somebody that you meant to follow up with but you haven't followed up with yet so just start thinking about that. All right, now we are on to taking off. So I love using the analogy of a roller coaster because taking off can get your heart beat racing it can get your palms all sweaty and it's not always the most comfortable thing in the world but it's really fun. So when your business takes off things start to accelerate and there's a lot more that you have to deal with than when it's just kind of going so-so in your business. So in my opinion, taking off is all about doing those scary things that you might be worrying about doing they're a little bit outside of your comfort zone but they make the biggest difference in your business and in your life. So these are the kinds of things that make everything come together. So for you, it could be making a crazy phone call that you're like, I'm so nervous I'm not sure how they're going to take this it could be writing a scary email it could be following up with somebody it could be asking to be a guest on a podcast asking to be a guest speaker it could be, you know, doing something crazy you've never done on a website before whatever it is for you. Now for me, that big thing came in my life just a couple of years ago and I decided to organize a conference. Now I had been wanting to organize a conference for many years and I kept putting it off just because the logistics are kind of complicated and there's a lot that goes into putting on a really big conference so there's a lot of fear and anticipation going on too but finally I said, okay, I'm going to set the date because once you set the date and you tell everybody it's happening you're still going back, right? You've got people showing up and even if you only have three people in the room you're still doing that event so that's exactly what I did and I set that date three months out from the time that I was starting to organize which I would never recommend by the way it did not give me a ton of time to get everything ready but it was really amazing we had 80 people show up in that room and they were so incredible the whole experience was amazing the event is called off the charts and we had, I think it was 78 women and two men so that was awesome so we put together this event and it really again changed the course of my business I was able to set myself apart in my market I was able to market completely differently and I also connected with these incredible speakers that I had as guest speakers at my event so again that was something that was so scary to me but once I set the date there was no turning back I had to market it, I had to find the space I had to get a videographer and a photographer and all those things that come together and I really think that setting the date is one of those things that works deadlines work for so many things so not just conferences if you're planning something so what I want you to think about right now is when you're going through your spiral staircase is there something that has been stopping you or that's kind of in the back of your mind as something that you should be doing but that you're just kind of not sure now's the right time or maybe when things calm down or you're a little bit less busy you would get around to doing because those are the kinds of things that can be game changers in your career and in your life and in your business and there will never be the perfect time to do them and that's the thing that I found to be so true just like with having kids or any major big project like that you have to make it happen you have to set the deadline announce it to the world and like I said it doesn't have to be a conference it could be reaching out to somebody and saying hey I would love to work with you or you should hire me I've actually had people do that and I did hire them or whatever it is for you it could just be making that sales call and asking for the sale those are the kinds of things that change the course of your life and in your business and by the way it does get easier just putting that out there so I want you to think to yourself right now what have you been avoiding because if there's something that is kind of in the back of your mind or it's kind of like niggling and you're like I really don't want to think about that right now Natalie don't bring it up and then I want you to write it down and think about it because that's probably the one thing that will change the course of your life and your business right now and like I said it's not like you're going to be completely done with everything this is a spiral staircase you're going to keep revisiting things and it doesn't have to be perfect the first time so with my off the charts conference last year we had 150 people and this year we're on track for about 200 or 250 so every year it gets easier things get better you gain some momentum and doing that first time is the hardest and yes your palms will be sweaty that's okay so now I want you to start thinking about your spiral staircase I've shared with you some of the things that I've had in my life and in my business but I want you to start looking back at some of the things that maybe you feel like are disjointed or it didn't really make sense in your life or in your business and kind of how they got you to where you are today because a lot of times we think you know I did this random thing maybe a college class that you took that didn't make sense or maybe it's an online class that you took that you're like man I never finished that and I don't know why sometimes those are the kinds of things that come back full circle and you don't quite know how they'll all fit in but they'll be exactly what you need for what you're doing next now I would love because we have such incredible WordPress savvy people here to link up and become allies with you so go and join us at www.meditationally.com and you can check out all of our WordPress plugins and stuff but that's not the point I really just want to connect with you there okay so as we're wrapping up here and looking off into the distance into the future this is my dog Millie by the way at the beach yes she has a fabulous life she really does so I want you to think about your life so far and I also want you to think about how you're going to get off into the future and I also want to make sure that you know that whatever it is that you're heading towards make sure that it's exactly what you want to be building and exactly what you're excited about because what you don't want to happen is to get there and realize oh wait I was on the staircase and stuff just like Natalie said but you know the staircase was the wrong one right so that's really huge and what I like to think about now is now that I have the software business now that I'm kind of where I am today I like to think about that younger me that was making that decision and think about it it would have been so much more natural for me to start a software business right out of college because that was my training but I never would have been to where I am today or nearly as successful as quickly because I wouldn't have known first of all what software to build who to sell it to, who wanted it how to price it, how to market it or any of that stuff so this whole spiral staircase was that business and this thing goes for Robin he had those inclinations around software from an early age and he went through his own spiral staircase and learned a ton about business so now that was able to kind of come back and partner in a brand new way so I hope that this was really helpful for you and I want to leave you with this everything that you have done in your life this far has led you to where you are today and is going to take you to where you're going thank you so much and please stay in touch with us