I have orders in from customers as well as a wholesale order of nearly 50 items to complete ASAP. Sometimes I let that kind of workload get the best of me. When I'm vulnerable late at night, and too exhausted to move, the anxiety of failure overcomes me. I am too tired to go sew, but too awake to fall asleep. And so I lay there kicking myself for forgetting this and stressing out about completing that.
It is a lot of pressure owning your own business. There is so much joy that comes with success and so much sorrow that comes with failure. I make every single piece. I invest my time and my life into my work. That's a large burden for a piece of cloth to hold.
So, knowing that this fear is a crippling weakness of mine, I am setting out to put the stress behind me.
I can't take it all so seriously anymore and that starts with allowing myself "free time."
I work from home, therefore I end up working all but maybe 3 hours a day, 6-7 days a week. When I'm not working, I think about work. Okay okay. I'm in a bad place! And I know it.
My goal for the weeks ahead are to take off for the whole weekend and not to put in more than 8 hours a day.
I took off (most) of this past weekend. I made cheesecake. I went for a walk with a friend and I painstakingly taped instagram photos in a grid above our bed.
These are my mini successes. These are the things that make me Kasey, not kay.em.kay. It is important for me to remember that we are different entities and that my worth is not wrapped up in the amount of dresses I was able to sew that day. I am the same even after getting a bad review. I am the same even after being praised. Work and life are separated. I can be a hard worker without being work incarnate.
I am feeling lifted today.
Kasey, you amaze & inspire me.
ReplyDeleteThanks for this honest & touching post- you've really shared some truisms that all of us makers surely can identify with. You've given me something to reflect on, and definitely something to strive for more whole-heartedly: balance. So elusive. So necessary for sanity.
Xo