Last Saturday night, Working Class Acupuncture had its first party since 2019. We celebrated the opening of WCA North! In general WCA throws good parties (which is ironic since almost everyone involved is an introvert) and this was a classic. There were kids running around and music and cake:
and champagne:
And when it got dark enough, we all filed outside and waited for Sara to flip the switch to light up the new/old sign. And then we took pictures and cheered.
And ate cake in the little parking lot.
(Yes, that cake stand is actually a rolling stool. We make do.)
After the last post about reclaiming the WCA sign from its unfortunate past, I thought about the phrase, to get one’s hopes up. It usually appears in negative form directed toward the future or the past — as in, don’t get your hopes up so high, or I should have known better than to get my hopes up. Seeing all the effort (and machinery) involved in hoisting our 500 lb neon sign into the air and onto a new building (not to mention all the behind the scenes labor to open a clinic in said building) made me think about the act itself of getting your hopes up — what it looks like when it’s happening, and how it takes work.
Getting your hopes up high enough so that other people can see them is an integral part of having a small business.
What’s a small business made out of but hope? A small business can’t thrive without customers and supporters and people who want the best for it, i.e. people who share in its hopes on some level. Community acupuncture as a small business needs even more of that than usual, because acupuncture is unfamiliar enough that word of mouth encouragement is crucial to getting new people into the clinic.
Also, what attracts people to the clinic is hope. See also: Last Stop on the Try-Anything Train. Many people who come to WCA have sought relief elsewhere without success, they’ve been disappointed repeatedly, so giving community acupuncture a try involves getting their hopes up again. Especially considering how many treatments it can take to make a dent in a chronic problem, showing up at the clinic week after week or month after month requires keeping your hopes up. Especially for people dealing with chronic pain, creating a better quality of life takes persistence. It’s about not giving up, over and over, even when you feel terrible.
For WCA, getting our hopes up is a similar exercise in vulnerability -- you can’t exactly pretend you don’t care when you’ve got a big red sign that says Acupuncture Can Change the World. Opening a new clinic at this moment in time says that we believe we can make good things happen, with individual patients and with the neighborhood, here at the corner of N Portsmouth and Lombard. It took some hard work and some heavy machinery, but we’ve gotten our hopes all the way up and they’re outlined in neon. Right where they belong.