There’s a particular kind of stress that comes with being self-employed… It’s not that dramatic, movie version of stress that you see, you know, the kind with a ticking clock and a boardroom showdown – it’s quieter, and a little harder to put a name or label on.
It’s the background hum of knowing that if things go wrong, there’s no one else to pick up the pieces and keep things moving.

Right now, things have gone wrong. Not catastrophically in any single way, but in that typical frustrating manner where it feels like everything is messing up all at once.

My MacBook has been sitting in the Apple Store for over a week with a keyboard fault, which means no video work, no proper workflow, just alternating between my iPad and iPhone and a whole lot of improvising to do simple clerical tasks to keep me ticking over.

My car is in the body shop for a few days.

I’ve spent the last week and a half being ill.

And underneath all of it, the delightfully quieter stress of self-employment, wondering whether the effort you’re trying to put into your work is being matched on the other side.

There’s an unspoken pressure when you’re self-employed to always be grateful, always be available, always be the one chasing. And sometimes you are, and that’s just the harsh reality of building something… But it doesn’t mean it isn’t exhausting.

Managing without the right tools, whether that’s your laptop, your car, your health, or just the energy that comes from feeling like your work is valued, is something nobody really prepares you for. Sure, you adapt, because you have to. You find workarounds, you lower your expectations of yourself in the short term, you try to protect the things that matter most. But adaptation has a cost, and that cost is usually invisible to everyone except you.

I don’t have a neat conclusion to this one, as I’m still in the middle of it.

I know the MacBook will come back, the car will be ready and I’ll feel better. But the broader questions about sustainability, about making sure the relationships and projects that fill your working life are genuinely reciprocal… it’s those things that don’t resolve as easily.

Sometimes the most honest thing you can say is: this is hard right now…

And that’s where I am.