self-employment diary #1
the never ending pursuit of having to make money
Today I’m turning back the corner of my bed where self-employment thoughts live.
I have been making money on the internet for 20 years. I’ve never had full-time employment — my resume without self- employment would look like: living history museum front desk and tour guide for the summer after I graduated high school, a year working at the MIT museum while I was a student there (I think I worked more hours than I went to class), and six months doing retail at local tea shop for a few hours a week back in 2019 when we had just moved to a new city and I was desperate to meet people.
That’s it. All my other working experience has been me working for myself. I’m good at it and I’ve paid my bills doing it for quite a number of years.
But in 1.5 months I’m going to lose 2/3rds of my income due to a client contract ending and I’m TERRIFIED.
I’ve known this was coming for a long time and I kept telling myself I have time to figure it out and it’s going to be okay. But that time is rapidly coming to an end and I haven’t figured it out yet.
As of writing this I’ve managed to replace about 25% of what I’m losing.
And this is the reality of self employment. It gives you so much freedom and flexibility and for only the cost of constant dread about what you’ll do if the money just stops coming in.
I’ve been very fortunate in that the only other time this happened to me was in 2020 when I lost pretty much all my clients when the pandemic hit. But that event shook my confidence to the core. I had always had a lot of faith in my ability to make money. There were times where I had enough in by bank account to make it through two weeks and still I didn’t feel the terror that I feel now. I knew I could make sales and bring in money and I always did.
All of this reminds me of when I was at MIT and I failed my first exam. I had always been a straight A student. I had never failed an exam and it didn’t seem like something that should happen to me. And so, it felt like something I could never recover from. (I let it derail me so much that a fail exam turned into two failed classes turned into choosing to transfer out at the end of the year.)
I don’t know how to get back to the version who had such unbelievable faith in herself.
But maybe going back isn’t the right answer. That version had fragile faith — faith that existed only as long as it was unquestioned, untested.
And the other option to that version is where I am now in sort of this perfectionist pessimist faith — faith that says well it didn’t work out once so it never will again
But maybe there’s a third version. A resilient version that can have space for knock backs and failures and still believe in her ability to figure it out. A trust that we can handle not only the threat of hard things but also genuinely hard things. And also believes that I am smart and talented and capable and good at being self-employed and will figure out how to make money once again.
I’m Joeli — I do support work for creative businesses in the form of task prioritisation, project management, money admin as well as body doubling. Book in call with me here to chat about any of those services.
I’m also doing a midlife pivot at the age of 40 and trying to become an artist/illustrator.
I document the messy journey of all of that here on Sharing From the Unmade Bed.