39BC

Here is a list of all my fears and anxieties about starting again…

Sharmadean Reid

10 Aug 2025 — 5 min read

I’ve been feeling crazy anxious lately in a sort of low-level hum that sits underneath everything I do. And I want to understand it. Not brush past it with a motivational quote or bury it under a productivity hack. So I’m writing it out.

Confidence isn’t the absence of doubt.

I know that now. I can be certain of my ability, my taste, my track record — and still have moments where I wonder if I’m delusional. It’s not a contradiction. It’s just how building things works. You hold both at once: the knowledge that you’re good at this, and the awareness that it could still fall apart.

Since July, I haven’t been sleeping properly. Since I moved back to Wolverhampton I feel like all I do is sleep, (women need 8-10 hours apparently) and now I can’t.

I hadn’t really slept since 2011 when my son was born and for years I thought it was just motherhood — the constant vigilance, the broken nights, the emotional multitasking that never really turns off.

But now I can see it for what it is: my business brain on high alert. Spinning through every possible outcome. Replaying conversations. Rewriting copy. Running launch projections at 3:47am.

It’s not inspiration. It’s fear and mental exhaustion and its stressing me out.

And I’m actually crying a little as I write this because I’m nervous to go back there again. But I want to understand it. So I’m unpacking each fear I have in the lists below…

We all lose our confidence sometimes. Here’s my loser list:

Part 2: Generational Rebellion: How Subcultures are Born

This is the second in a five-part series I’m writing about how subcultures are built. Read the rest here. This week we dive into the socio and cultural condition required for a subcultre to be born. From September, Niamh Donoghue and I are hosting The Worldbuilder Show on The

Advice to Gen-Alpha: How creating a club night will teach you everything you need to know about life, art and business.

This is the first in a five-part series I’m writing about how subcultures are built. As I continue to build my brand I realise that a huge part of it comes from my lived experience in subcultures — the pirate stations, the club nights, the tiny magazines, the dodgy after-hours

New Method 33 | But Take As Much As You Can

This week’s New Method — But Take As Much As You Can — is about rejecting the conditioning that tells women to be satisfied with less. Too often, we’re taught to take only what’s offered, to downplay our worth, and to see ambition as greed. This method flips that

The real AI superpower is you...

Last week I gave a talk for Black Ballad called How To Use AI As Your Superpower, and I was blown away by the response. This presentation wasn’t about tips and tricks. It was about asking one powerful question first: 💡 “What do you bring to the table that AI