This is such a timely prompt. I have just been sitting in my garden listening to the birds sing as I drank my first cup of coffee, and thought…shouldn’t I be working?
Since the first lockdown in 2020, I have worked predominantly from home. For the three years up until my redundancy, I worked almost entirely from home except for periodic meetings. But mostly, things were done online because people realised that it was actually more productive to hold meetings online than spend countless hours travelling around areas to get to meetings. Before 2020, in a week at work I probably spent the best part of the equivalent of a day just travelling to and from meetings. Such a waste of what could have been productive time, though I did often make (hands free) calls from my car whilst travelling. Still, it was dead time especially if I was stuck in traffic as I regularly was. After my redundancy, for the first year, I worked entirely at home writing my books. Then, I started working three days a week cleaning to bring some money into the house. What I have just realised is that, since I started writing (before my redundancy), I have been working seven days a week.
Why is this important? For two reasons. One was because while I was sitting outside with my coffee, I was questioning my decision to reduce my cleaning hours and comparing myself to someone I know who works seven days a week, always out of the house. I felt, somehow, that I was ‘less’ because I wasn’t doing the same thing. The reason she does is, purely and simply, because she needs the income. So do I, really. But then I reminded myself – I do work seven days a week. I write, seven days a week. If I’m not writing, I am working on the infrastructure around my writing (last Saturday, I spent the entire morning sorting my website) or doing research or learning. The only time I stop is either when I am asleep, when I am doing work around the house, or when I am cooking or eating. The difference is that my writing is not yielding an immediate financial return. But it will.
I am not judging my friend at all, she is an amazing woman. I am very fond of her and I respect her immensely. I am just learning to accept that we have very different outlooks on life – and that, in and of itself, is as it should be. We are all different, we are all unique. For myself, I am tired of simply surviving, which I have always been doing I recognise now, I am focused on thriving. I have always been ambitious, somewhat goal oriented (not, though, enough to have a 5 year plan as I’ve explained in a previous blog), and I am actively pursuing growth. I have an innate growth mindset, and I am learning to embrace and recognise that more. I am developing myself alongside my writing, and at the age of 54 I am starting to truly learn who I am. Back to my square peg round hole analogy, where I’m creating my own round peg rather than looking for something else to provide that.
And this is where another realisation has come in. Work has always felt exactly that – like work. The struggle to get out of bed in the morning because what you’re doing isn’t fulfilling. Well, I don’t feel that way about writing. They say, do what you love or are passionate about for a living and you will never work a day in your life. I never truly understood what that meant until now. Because whilst I have always had jobs that have been, essentially, working in service of others, to help others, and to an extent I have been passionate about aspects of them, they have never been jobs that have been something I have loved or been passionate about. So, they have felt like work. As I sat in the garden this morning, berating myself, I reminded myself of how hard I do work. I have self-published two books, I am writing two more, I write blogs pretty much every day, I have a part-time job, I look after a home and family. The latter two do feel like work at times, the former two do not. And that is why I berated myself. Because I hadn’t made the link between my writing and work. It doesn’t feel like work. It’s something I just love to do. So, I don’t even think about work/life balance because, for me, it is all in balance. And I am present for my family because I am happier doing what I love.
There is a third lesson here as well. And that is to not compare myself with others. My life is not my friend’s life, and her life is not mine. We have completely different experiences, even when some of those experiences are similar on the face of it. Comparison is the worst thing we can do to ourselves because we never truly know what’s going on in someone else’s life. We see the surface, but we never see the fullest extent of what’s going on underneath. And we shouldn’t judge as a consequence, but equally we shouldn’t compare either. Because while we may think we are comparing apples with apples, actually we’re likely comparing apples to chimpanzees.
This prompt couldn’t have been more timely because I was actually going to write this blog anyway! Doing what you love, what you are passionate about, means it doesn’t feel like work. Yes, you can potentially get carried away and do too much of it (is that possible?!), but if it makes you happy then everyone benefits from that. And balance doesn’t become an issue.
Louisa Simpson 