Why Self-Employment Matters to Me More Than Ever
The last few days have been a pretty solid reminder of why being self-employed matters so much to me. And no, it’s not because I can work in my pajamas, drink coffee whenever I want, or randomly decide Tuesday is now a hiking day. Although I’m certainly not complaining about those things.
For me, it comes down to something much bigger: sometimes life changes the entire plan without asking permission, and I need to be able to change with it.
This week was supposed to include transplant clinic and labs for my kid. We’ve been doing the transplant thing for a very long time, so while those appointments are never exactly casual, they’re familiar. You go to clinic. You do the labs. You see the team. You deal with whatever needs dealing with, and then you go home and continue with life.
Except this time we didn’t just go home and continue with life.
The blood sugar came back at 504, and the A1C was 10.6, and suddenly a routine transplant clinic day turned into a hospital admission and a diabetes diagnosis. We’re still waiting to find out exactly what type and what all of this is going to look like going forward. The especially wild part is that there were zero symptoms. Nothing that had us sitting around beforehand thinking something was obviously wrong.
And just like that, everything else on the schedule became significantly less important.
This Is Why I Built My Life This Way
Self-employment gets romanticized a lot. There’s plenty of talk about freedom, flexibility, being your own boss, working from wherever you want, and setting your own hours. All of that can be true, but it’s not really the kind of freedom that matters most to me.
What matters is being able to look at my day when something happens and say, okay, this isn’t happening today. I can move things around. I can reschedule something. I can push a design to tomorrow. I can answer the email that actually needs an answer and leave the rest sitting there. I can adjust without worrying about whether I have enough PTO, whether someone will be irritated that I’m missing work, or whether I need to justify why my family needs me right now.
Our family has lived with complicated medical stuff for a very long time. I learned a long time ago that you can wake up with a perfectly ordinary Thursday planned and, by lunchtime, be living an entirely different Thursday. I don’t want every unexpected appointment, hospital admission, test result, or family emergency to create a second emergency at work.
That doesn’t mean the work doesn’t matter. It means I’ve intentionally created work that can bend when my life needs it to.
My Business Keeps Me Going, Too
There’s another side of this that I don’t think I talk about enough, though. My business isn’t only something I need flexibility from. It’s also something I need to come back to.
When you’re sitting in hospitals, waiting for lab results, listening to doctors, learning a whole new set of medical information, and trying to process what the hell just happened, it can become the only thing your brain has room for. Everything starts revolving around numbers, medications, appointments, questions, and what happens next.
Creating gives my brain somewhere else to go for a little while.
I can draw something. I can work on a pattern. I can think about the next collection. I can write. I can make something that didn’t exist yesterday. Sometimes I only have twenty minutes for it. Sometimes I have enough space to disappear into it for a few hours. And sometimes all I manage is scribbling an idea in my notes because, apparently, my brain has decided that the middle of chaos is an excellent time to come up with another project.
But it gives me something that is mine.
My business exists outside of medical appointments, caregiving responsibilities, bills, schedules, and all the other pieces of life that constantly demand attention. Making art, walking trails, noticing weird mushrooms, turning something I saw outside into a pattern, writing about whatever is rattling around in my head, and figuring out what I want to create next reminds me that there is still an entire life happening around the difficult parts.
That matters just as much as the flexibility.
Flexibility Doesn’t Mean I’m Not Working
There’s also a weird assumption sometimes that being self-employed means having endless free time. I can assure you, it does not. I have deadlines, projects, orders, websites, emails, designs, marketing, administrative work, clients, and approximately seventeen ideas trying to elbow each other out of the way at any given moment.
I work a lot. But I’ve worked intentionally to create a life where work isn’t automatically the one with the final say.
Some weeks I can put my head down and get an incredible amount done. Other weeks, transplant clinic turns into a hospital admission and a brand-new diabetes diagnosis. Those weeks require a different definition of what getting things done looks like.
Maybe success that day isn’t finishing the design I planned to finish. Maybe it’s being there for my kid, understanding what the doctors are telling us, figuring out what questions we need to ask, answering the one email that genuinely cannot wait, and letting everything else sit until tomorrow.
Because the work will still be there tomorrow.
This Is the Kind of Freedom I Actually Wanted
I don’t think I ever wanted freedom from working. I actually like working. I like building things. I like making art. I like taking some ridiculous little thought floating around in my head and figuring out how to turn it into something real that another person can see, use, wear, hang on their wall, or hold in their hands.
What I wanted was ownership of my time and the ability to decide what matters most today.
Most days that might mean designing, writing, working with clients, walking dogs, handling community work, updating a website, or tackling whatever project currently has my attention. Sometimes it means heading out for a walk to clear my head. And sometimes it means sitting beside my kid in a hospital because the routine appointment we thought we were going to turned into something none of us expected.
None of those things cancel out the others. They’re all pieces of my life.
And I think that’s the part of self-employment I appreciate more every year. I didn’t build a business because I wanted to escape my life or because I dreamed of sitting on a beach somewhere answering emails from a laptop. That version of entrepreneurship never particularly appealed to me.
I built a business that could exist inside my life.
A life that is creative, messy, unpredictable, busy, occasionally chaotic, and sometimes really fucking hard. A life where the plan can change in a matter of hours and I need to be able to change with it.
This week, the plan changed. So I adjusted my days, moved what could be moved, and focused on what needed me most.
And when there was a little room again, I came back to the work.
Not because I felt like I should be productive, but because creating is one of the things that reminds me I’m still me when everything else gets loud.
And that may be one of the biggest reasons I keep building this business in the first place.
