#11 Breakfast for five hours
about work, making things, and everyday indulgence
Today marks 1.5 years since I first started what would become a whole new chapter of my life — working on my own. Over the past year and a half, I've been discovering things that I feel were always just beneath the surface when it comes to my relationship to work, productivity, and how success relates to my ideas of self-worth. Beyond the practicals of running a business (girlboss, gaslight, gatekeep), what's been more interesting is watching myself react to different situations, confront the idea of failure, and define my idea of how work fits into my life, and how to build a life that accommodates joy, time and freedom at a time where I have the possibility of doing so.
At the beginning, I remember the energy I was fuelling this new gig with to be pretty YOLO in nature. I literally had nothing to lose. I had just quit a job that was draining me in more ways than one — it was emotionally difficult to deal with because of the way management treated employees, and their reminders of how I owed them my best because they gave me a work visa — and it was physically exhausting too, causing prolongued stress that took a toll on my body, climaxing during June in 2021. I was diagnosed with hyperthyroidism, a disorder triggered by a combination of genetics, stress and lifestyle. I had reached a turning point in that job after three years, finding the conditions increasingly hostile, and the added stress of the pandemic as an immigrant in a European country was compounded by the fact that I could not lose my job, or I would lose the right to live here.
It was a lot. But also, maybe that's what led me to change things, radically, drastically.
When I first started working full time in 2018, I was carrying a Big Girl Gold Star Syndrome. I was a high performer in school, and among the Honor students in my uni years. I looooved a fuckin Gold Star. External validation wasn't the only reason I did what I did, but it sure as hell trained me to perform well. The meritocracy was alive and thriving in my head, so you can imagine the massive letdown entering the workforce was. I thought hard work was rewarded with more trust, more autonomy and flexibility, and a higher paycheck. And maybe that is the case in other companies, I haven't fully ruled that out yet. Whichever the case, my first full time job wasn't like that. It was also the first real time I was confronted with being a foreigner in the Netherlands, where I'd already lived for the past 3 years. Passing as a White European woman shielded me from a lot of discrimination, questioning and prejudice in many, many instances. I was always reminded of my otherness when it came to paying tuition fees or sorting out visas, but never in the street, at parties, or university. I could blend in easily as long as my passport wasn't checked.
Combining my otherness in the workplace — sorting my work visa being an “issue” that took more time and money than any of my peers in a small company — plus the fact that I needed to meet income requirements of a highly skilled migrant permit, meant that I had to squeeze every ounce of myself in exchange for earning my place. I was reminded of it in the ways I was treated and in the conversations I had. I was reminded of it when it came to talks about raising my salary, when my peers were cashing in even when I was outperforming them. I was reminded of it when I was offered a permanent contract. I was reminded of it when I signed it, arm twisted into an impossible position in the summer of 2020 — take this or leave the company (and leave your visa) — I was reminded of it when I quit a year later, when management suggested I go back to Latin America and figure out a new step that would be “more comfortable for me”.
An experience like that doesn't go away very easily or quickly. My body wasn't forgetting it anytime soon, either. The prolonged stress triggered health problems and a host of issues that I'd have to face head-on at 24, in a foreign country, on my own. It was a terrifying time and it felt isolating in the context of Covid-19. Nevertheless, I think it cemented a few beliefs about work that helped me build a life that makes me happy: no one is irreplaceable at work. Advocate for yourself, your worth, and your boundaries. Understand your (very human) limits. When is enough truly enough? Do you have to get there to understand you've pushed your limits past what's self-compassionate or healthy? You are not your job. And most of all — work is not a meritocracy. The meritocracy is dead. It, in fact, never existed. Work as we know it isn't about who performs best and gets the gold star. It's about clocking your hours, doing the best you can do, and catching a cheque. At best, work is purposeful, it gives you energy, it makes an impact on you and those around you, maybe even the world. But it also isn't the end of life as you know it if work is just another way to pay for rent, groceries and freedom to do as you please. Both are worthy of respect. Both are equally to be celebrated. Don't let the business podcast men of the world convince you otherwise. More isn't always more. Sometimes you just need a silly little walk and a side job and a way to make it work, not a 5-year plan or a 2-year McKinsey program. And that's okay.
The past year and a half has been a lot about integrating what I learned from my old job, and any other previous experiences. I had already amassed 3 years of largely independent work — self-reliance, initiative, proactiveness, foresight — and these all came in handy when the time was right. I was able to think about the things I'd learned and chosen to leave behind what wasn't working anymore; feeling controlled, smothered or manipulated by a place that kept expecting me to only give my best, at unsustainable speeds, for as long as possible in exchange for a piece of paper that allowed me to live here. I traded in the uncertainty of going solo over the daily discomfort of feeling overworked in a place I didn't believe in. Even if I did believe in it, I think nowadays it's a bit more difficult to get me to overextend myself to that degree. And that's something that's going to stick, hopefully.
Learning to rely on myself was also about developing a sense of emotional muscle, if you could call it that. It's been about making myself understand and believe that I'll be okay, regardless of what happens. That I've got my own back, and that I can take care of myself, even when shit goes south. A big part of that is just growing up, regardless of whether I work under a manager again or not. It also meant that relying on myself was a balancing act between meeting my needs and allowing help to be given to me when it was offered (which still isn't easy). Taking care of myself has many shapes and forms, and I've only started exploring what that means in other parts of my life. It looks differently depending on where you're standing, in relation to what, and in what kind of situation, but it's something that's given me a sense of peace that I never really had.
Through the year, I've been digging into the idea of how to build a life where work is a way to feel more free, more purposeful with my time, and still feel that my everyday life is rewarding. There were definitely bumps in the process, like the guilt that would come every weekday morning if I wasn't up before 8.00, the sense of urgency that would overtake every day and make me scarf down breakfast, just to say I'd checked my emails no later than 10 in the morning. It was rough. It made me question why I was trying to make myself into a hyperproductive girlboss by 9 am if my nature was indicating otherwise. I have no 3 pm dips — in fact, my most productive hours can be by the end of the 9-to-5 workday, and some nights I'll stay up just thinking about next steps or writing something down. I was doing some things for the benefit of other systems or ways of working, and not for myself, and that took a while to figure out. It took even longer to suck out the guilt from my mornings and let myself clock in later than I forced myself to. But it also makes me a lot happier knowing I don't need to be up if I don't want to be. It's as simple as that.
Coming back to now, 2023: thinking about how I do things for the sake of doing them, and how that's probably what's made me the happiest and driven me to the most success in my own terms.
Talking with a friend one evening, we discuss the different measures of commercial success; money, views, followers, engagement, lucrative contracts, partnerships, entrepreneurship, product development. There are so little ways to succeed in a world like that. If those are the only ways that I can succeed, then what I do probably doesn't amount to much. We land on something that I've been feeling for a while, even back in high school; how I'd feel reading something I enjoyed or writing an essay about a book I loved, or doing interviews in university for my end of year project, or watching movies and analyzing them in class. A lot of those things I just liked for the sake of doing them. I enjoyed the process for the process itself, not for the outcome of it. Making stuff feels like that.
Making stuff, if it's something you really love, isn't about the applause or the grade or the praises. It’s just as simple as making it for the sake of having made something, and understanding that it won't always resonate with people. That it doesn't have to. When you take yourself out of the equation — out of the things you make, out of your job, out of your relationships — what's left is just the enjoyment of them, and the feeling of having created something. Holding that close to myself has been what's kept me feeling successful, even when I've had dramatic client fallouts and projects that weren't what other clients were looking for. It's given me a sense of peace that's sturdy, stable, solid. And in that way, it's also given me a sense of self.
Maybe that's the thing I've been thinking about most: what being successful, and what success is, to me. Nowadays a successful day means I have time to stretch my body in a temperature controlled room in the morning, and visit the market for fresh vegetables. I have time to buy a blank canvas and paint as a new home decor project. I have time to work in the afternoons at the café next door that closes at 7 pm, so I don't have to rush home. I have time to go to dinner with friends or catch a movie at my favorite cinema. I have time to call my mom on a Tuesday at 2 p.m. to ask her how she is. I have time to go to my favorite coffee place on a Monday at 4 p.m. I have time to write this, for the sake of writing it. I have time.
Life will get more complicated in some ways and simpler in others. It will be more expensive in some ways, cheaper in others. And this is where I get extremely cheesy — none of it comes close to how I feel when I have a choice over how I spend my time. How I spend my mornings. For now, that is enough. Having this for a year and a half? Unimaginable. Back then, the me that was freshly heartbroken, homesick, isolated and sick, would've never thought it. It's a reality I never thought was possible for people like me, living on foreign land, holding passports that mean nothing. But here I am! Here I am. Here I am. Here it is.