I stress out about a lot of things I probably shouldn't worry over. I am sure a few of you can relate...and if not, please tell me your secret! One of my biggest stressors (even if that's not a word) this year has been, honestly, my perception of myself. Going full-time in photography has been nothing short of wonderful - I would never in a million years have dreamed that I was cut out for it, but this life is perfect for me. I can work from the couch or my standing desk. I can start work early or take time off in the afternoon when I have evening hours. I can visit family when I have destination engagement sessions like this past weekend in at the Trump Winery in Charlottesville.
Yet what stresses me out is not my work, but how much work I have. Sometimes I am busy from sun up to sundown hustling, sending emails, updating social media, photographing clients, and taking care of my daily duties. Other days I wake up with a fairly short to-do list and a weird feeling that I should always be busy no matter what. That if I do not fill an 8 or 9 hour day with work on my business, I am doing something wrong.
It's hard to change this feeling since I started my adult life in a 40+ hour per week job. Routines are comforting to me, even if I can appreciate change for what it is. These past few weeks have given me no kind of routine. I have been traveling a lot, we sold our house and moved to a new city, and spent weeks setting everything up. For every moment I spent not working on business I was working on unpacking, cleaning, and making our house into a home.
And oddly I started to feel a sense of guilt. If I was working an office job I couldn't be washing dishes and sweeping floors at 2pm. If I had to be away from my house I couldn't knock out a few boxes per day. Why should I stop working to take care of chores when normal people don't get that luxury?
Then it struck me, as obvious an answer as I could have imagined - that's why it's awesome to work from home. Some weeks my work is all-consuming and I drown in managing it all, spending far more than 8 hours each day to accomplish what I have to get done. But I am realizing that it's ok to sometimes let work/life balance tilt the other way. As I was listening to the Being Boss podcast they mentioned that this balance is not a 50-50, unchanging number - it's a growing, changing process that looks different depending on what's going on in your life or your business.
I am so very lucky to be able to work from home. I'm so thankful to be able to flex my hours so I can have dinner with Nathan every night when he gets home. And I'm grateful that when I do need to work way past my normal closing time I love what I do so much that I don't resent it. There should be no guilt - whether you work outside of your home or not - and I'm determined to just be thankful for the life and the work I have, even if it looks different than I ever dreamed it would be. And I've gotta say - it looks a whole lot better than I imagined.
