Andrea Spent Her Whole Life Twisting Into the Shape Other People Needed. Then She Stopped.
- BD3 Solutions
- Jun 15
- 5 min read
I Built a Landmark Store, Launched 1,000 Artists, and Walked Away From All of It
By Andrea Spyros | BD3 Solutions
I have a word for the thing I spent most of my life doing.
Pretzeling.
I didn't name it until recently—until I was able to look back with enough distance to see the shape of the whole pattern. But the pattern was there from the beginning: from the Michigan business school applications and the blue suit and the advertising firm interviews to the eighteen years I spent building something extraordinary while carefully managing how I looked from the outside.
I was good at it. I got things done. I built real things that genuinely mattered. But I was doing it at a constant low-grade cost that I didn't fully understand until I stopped.
The Blue Suit
When I was at Michigan's Ross School of Business, recruiting season arrived, and I put on the blue suit. I went to the interviews at the advertising firms—the ones my background and my resume pointed toward; the ones that made sense as the next step.
I sat in those interviews quietly hoping I wouldn't get the job.
I didn't, not a single one. And it took me much longer than it should have to understand that this was useful information. My body already knew that I was applying to a shape I didn't want to inhabit. My conscious mind kept trying to push toward it anyway, because it was the right move on paper, because it's what people with my credentials were supposed to do.
So instead, I opened a gift shop.
Eighteen Years, a Thousand Artists, and a Pretzel
Handmade Galleries LA became something real. Over eighteen years, it launched over a thousand artists' careers. It became a landmark in Los Angeles, a place people came back to, a community that organized itself around what we were doing. I was proud of it. I still am.
And I was also, for much of that time, pretzeling.
I kept my Feng Shui and Reiki training quiet. I backgrounded the Qigong, the energy work, and any of my “woo-woo” practices. I had learned to introduce them carefully (or not at all) depending on who was in the room. Even though I worked with artists, I had corporate clients, so I presented as corporate-adjacent. I was building something that felt like me while simultaneously managing a different shape I presented to the world. I’m tired just thinking about it now.
It's exhausting in a way that's hard to describe. Not dramatic exhaustion—daily exhaustion. The cumulative cost of small adjustments, constant calibrations, and the ongoing effort of ensuring that what you're showing matches what the room expects.
The Closing, and What Came After
When I finally closed the shop, I did it in about six months. My oldest asked me why I was crying if I'd chosen to close it.
I couldn't explain it well in the moment. The grief wasn't about the decision—the decision was right, and I'd known it was coming for a while. The grief was about something else—stepping out of a shape I'd inhabited for eighteen years. It was about not knowing yet what came next.
The two years that followed were what I call the “Dark Night of the Soul Rodeo.” I've been through more than one—but this one was significant. Because what it required of me, ultimately, was the thing I'd been putting off for longer than I'd acknowledged: figuring out who I was without the performance, without the pretzel.
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The Most Expensive Kind of Procrastination
Here's what I understand now.
The pretzel—the shape-holding, the calibrating, the careful management of which version of yourself appears in which room—is a form of procrastination. Not the kind that shows up on your to-do list. The deeper kind, where what you're putting off isn't a task but a truth.
All the energy that goes into holding a shape that isn't yours is energy that can't go toward anything you actually came here to do. The work you could be doing, the relationships you could be building, the version of this business or career or life that actually fits. It's all downstream of the energy you're spending on the performance.
When I stopped holding the pretzel shape—when Nancy and I built the version of BD3 Solutions that actually felt like us, that led with our real backgrounds and our actual beliefs, that said what we actually think about procrastination instead of what sounded most professional—the things I'd been "procrastinating on" for years suddenly became possible.
Not because I got more disciplined. Because I finally had the energy.
What's Actually Available
I'm not suggesting that stepping out of a shape you've been holding for years is simple. I know from personal experience that it isn't. There's real grief involved. There's the disorientation of not knowing yet what replaces the shape. There could be a dark night of the soul, too.
But I also know—and this is what I most want to leave you with—that the things that become possible on the other side of that are worth it. The work is better. The relationships are more real. The energy that used to go into the performance goes somewhere that actually matters.
And the procrastination, the deep kind, the kind that's about putting off being yourself—that loosens. Not all at once. But it does loosen.
Come Talk About It
If any of this sounds familiar—if you've been holding a shape that isn't quite yours and wondering what it would cost to set it down—we'd love to talk about it with you.
We're hosting a free live conversation on June 20th. No slides, no pitch, no pre-packaged presentation. Just Nancy and me, answering your questions, sharing what we've learned the hard way, and being exactly who we actually are.
You've been reading our stories for 12 weeks now. We'd like to hear yours.
Come as you are. Join us at 10 am PT on June 20th here → https://zoom.us/j/91060817819
Next week: The story about how Nancy and I came together to become partners in BD3 Solutions.
Andrea Spyros and Nancy DeFina are the founders of BD3 Solutions and creators of Untangle Procrastination™, a science-based program built on methods from the Stanford Behavior Design Lab.
Andrea Spyros and Nancy DeFina are the founders of BD3 Solutions and creators of Untangle Procrastination™, a science-based program built on models and methods from the Stanford Behavior Design Lab.
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