#44 Thinking in Possibilities
Sometimes, we don't have time to be terrified.
And just like that, it really is February! REALLY. I am writing to you now, sitting at the dining room table, after spending a few hours sending out cold emails to B-corp-certified creative agencies for partnerships, and the occasional application to a bougee stroller company seeking their new global social media manager. What can I say, I contain multitudes.
"It's just a phase," says Nina, sitting at her newly-angled desk, her monitor quietly glowing in the background in her bedroom. Her big window angled up West is facing a blue sky, the color of dark indigo, just before sundown. The days are finally getting longer. Spring is just around the corner - the dry spell of work and Winter is just about to end. I don't know if I fully rationally believe it, but I can feel it.
Last time I wrote you, I was discussing creativity and survival and how often, it feels like if you're focused on survival, there's little room for creativity to bloom. And yet creativity is a means of survival; what a dichotomy. What a way to live! Everything's fucked if you don't create, and everything remains fucked if you do. You can't win such a conundrum, but you can have some essays to show for it. Right?
Nina says it's just a dry spell, and dry spells happen. I am not used to thinking of work as a dry spell - I think of periods without sex as dry spells, colloquially. And yet, a bit like self-employment, sex as a single woman in her 20s in a capital city can be just the metaphor: it often happens when you're most open to adventure, have an inquisitive disposition, and hit the bar/dance floor/event feeling comfortable with yourself. At least that's the good sex (or the sex we all would like to be having, right?)
I digress.
Securing work as a self-employed employee of your own employment (haHA!) is a bit like that. You do continuously put yourself out there, and you're hoping that you'll find a match. Hopefully, it'll be something enjoyable, won't make you hate yourself in the morning after a good night of fun, and is clearly communicated in the way that - actually - very few FWB arrangements actually manage. (Can you see where my head is at? It is in many places).
It has been almost two and a half years since I began this new adventure - can you believe it? (I can't). I always say I fell into self-employment rather than crafted a Machiavellian, capitalistic Bert-Jan plan to achieve it. I was looking for income while I found the next full-time role. The idea of self-employment didn't terrify me because I didn't have the time to be terrified. Time is money, and I was wasting it if I thought I could sit there, full of self-doubt and imaginary scenarios of public humiliation. I had to do something, and I better do it now, otherwise your savings are gone and boom! On your ass you are. Poetic.
So no, I don't think this is for everyone. I don't think being your own boss is glam or glitz galore. I enjoyed an extremely abundant two years - I broke into profit shortly after launching, and I kept drawing in sustainable, long-term work that felt like play a solid 60% of the time. I kept my fixed costs low, and when I didn't, I luxuriated in the freedom of having time and time, more of it, expanding indefinitely into the horizon. I went home for months at a time for the first time in eight years. I visited friends I hadn't seen since pre-pandemic times. For all the overwhelm of feeling like I paused my 20s during the global Panasonic, there was so much more to play with in this new era of my life.
And yet, just like every era transitions and shapeshift, eras also end and begin all over again! Such is the neverending, fluid nature of reality. Not to be too Pea the Feary, because that spot's already taken, but reality does keep responding to who you're being, and when the abundant era drew to a close, I started being uncertain. I started feeling like an impostor. I personalized every single non-reply to a cold email; I took it to heart when a business didn't see the need to partner with me. I became this little tiny service provider; this small voice who wanted to find that abundance again, stressing out about the meaning behind all of it.
That is what we do! We try to find meaning in everything. I found a lot of meaning in the past months, especially after receiving a permit extension that meant I was able to remain in the Netherlands until late 2028. Even with tangible proof that your work is wanted, that it is deemed necessary, even, nothing will make you feel like you're enough until you choose you are. That type of shit is frustrating, and it's not limited to self-employment. It is in every person's life at one point or another unless you're Bert-Jan and you've grown up your whole life being told you can do anything (I, too, would have loved us all to receive such encouragement from society at large) but alas, the feeling of being good enough / smart enough / different enough can rear its head even in the simplest of moments; even as you write your carefully curated LinkedIn posts in the hopes that you'll be discovered. "You're just who we're looking for!" it'll read. "Here's a contract for a retainer valued at 60eur an hour, 15 hours a week, for the next 12 months!" Just like that, your faith in yourself is restored.
Of course, it isn't.
I also found this really interesting feeling of immunity I never knew I carried with me. But I did. Somewhere along the past two years I got more comfortable with the feeling of security, and felt like I had graduated out of the first stage of self-employment. Surely, I had already passed the exams titled "I'm just a newbie, who nobody knows!" and "No one will hire me, because there's so many others with so much more experience!" and the latest banger, "Maybe I am just lost and I got it all wrong, and I should work for McKinsey." That one was rough, lol. No hate for my consultancy boys and girlies, but a room filled with well-pressed suits and a commute to the palace of steel that is Zuidas is simply not my flavor (or color) palette.
It was more like, "I have worked at my business for a few years now, so I'm surely immune to dry periods/failure/slow periods/imposter syndrome." And yet! AND YET. LinkedIn is filled with execs running 10-year careers, chiefs of Marketing, heads of Product, recently laid off, just looking for the next gig, the next thing. A DECADE at Google, A DECADE at Salesforce, or whatever the next big tech company is, just to be trimmed, like fat, from the insides of your time within that office building. And I realized that immunity is imaginary, and not only constricted to the type of job or career you build - no one is actually safe from the risk of a layoff or the effects of inflation/a recession/a company needing to cut costs and make their budgets.
I even got to the point of noticing that whichever way I looked at it, the risk was imaginary - there are just bigger imagined risks attached to one type of career over the other. And yet things can change; the tide can turn; the next chapter comes. There is power in perspective.
I recently had a call with my coach, my beloved, iconic, goddess Alicia. I swear by her work btw and I think she is an actual angel sent from above, but no big deal, lol. She has helped me change my life in a way that a few child and adolescent psychologists never could, not even the one in my early 20s. I found her the way you find people who change your life often do: in a very mundane, everyday thing like signing up for a yoga class at a studio next to Amstel. We kept in touch after she announced she was leaving the studio, and then boom - around a year later, mid-Panasonic, there she was - offering coaching to women wanting to improve their lives. To feel more embodied, confident and clear. And then boom! I was there. I've been calling her for guidance for three years.
This is all to say, she has seen me when I was unemployed and feeling uncertain; she has seen me regress in real-time to childhood and forgive myself and my parents; she has seen me journey my way through trying something new, taking a new direction in my career, choosing to try something foreign.
I tell her how I'm feeling in our call. The immunity feeling, the false sense of security, the risk aversion, the lows of it. The feelings of failure. "What does failure mean to you?" she asks. "I feel I've already failed," I tell her.
We continue the conversation shortly after and I realize; the feeling of failure's been felt and there's no oncoming danger with it. No oncoming, imminent death. We can think in failures and a million misgivings, or we can think in possibilities.
Nowadays, I am getting closer, inch by inch, to who I was two and a half years ago. Someone who was thinking in possibilities.
