Purging Demons and 2013

If you feel it necessary to report back to members of my family who do not read this blog (or even know how to use a computer) about how inappropriate my life and career is, do us both a favor and just don’t continue after the jump.

We haven’t exactly been shouting from the rooftops about how awesome this year has been because, well, it hasn’t been.  The business struggled for really the first time and we’re still coming out of that.  There are months when we don’t have enough, when there are too many bills and we get to pick and choose what to pay.  It’s stressful, scary and demoralizing.  We’ve had to let go of things and at times, ask for help.

It’s easy to look at our life and say, “Oh, well you should get rid of your office and work at home again” without knowing that the office is not only our place to be the most effective at our work.  It’s also the best way to provide tax relief.  At home, we can write off 10% of the mortgage and utilities before self-employment.  At the office, everything, 100% is a write off AFTER self-employment tax.  We spent many hours talking with a CPA, a tax advisor and financial planner before we signed that lease.  Giving up our office would be a temporary stopgap solution at best because in the long run, we’d be screwed with the IRS.

An even easier solution (ha!) to all of our business issues  is for me to return to teaching.  This isn’t going to happen for a variety of reasons.  Most importantly, teaching isn’t where my passion is anymore.  I won’t spend my life in a career that requires that kind of enthusiasm, dogged dedication to excellence, and passion.  I’d be doing a disservice to everyone I came in contact with, most importantly students.  They deserve a teacher who cares desperately about what they are learning, struggling with, and experiencing.  I wouldn’t be that teacher anymore, not after everything that happened in my last job.

The Department of Labor says most people change careers 3 to 7 times in their working lifetime and change jobs 11 times.  If I decided not to teach and become a nurse, would this be something people would bring up to me?  No, because if I was a nurse, I would be someone’s employee and there’s no financial uncertainty there.  I didn’t plan to do what I’m doing now but here’s the thing.  I love what I do.  I love it.  I love learning, conceptualizing, executing a design, delivering comps, talking through what a client wants and needs.  I love when people admire what I’ve done.  No one really admired my teaching career.  In fact, 95% of the time, people winced when I said I taught high school and immediately they wanted to know how I could stand to do such a job.  Gee, thanks?

In my family, teaching is the family business.  My grandparents were teachers.  My uncles, my aunts, my parents, my sister, cousins.. just about everyone teaches.  Walking away from it doesn’t happen until retirement and even then, you’ll probably go back and substitute or proctor or do something in schools.  But I didn’t walk away of my own volition.  I was forced out and then I had a choice to make.  Did I want to look for another job somewhere else and have to answer questions about why I’m looking for another position or do I want to pursue something different, something that would be a huge challenge and fulfill my desire to be creative?

Initially, I planned to write, mainly travel writing.  I’ve always wanted to write about the fabulous places I’ve visited and lived but never had the time.  Without teaching, I had the time to figure out what to do with myself.  It wasn’t easy.  There were buckets of tears, a few really heated arguments with Rob, and more self-doubt than I thought possible.  Eventually though, through some ingenuity, stubborn willpower and dumb luck, I started to learn web design.  Rob refused to help me because he knew I needed to figure it out on my own, to find my own feet and my own identity.

Now, I don’t do much web design, mostly because I love print design so much more.  It’s taken time to learn what I needed to know but what I’ve learned is this: I’m good at what I do.  I’m not the best designer out there or the most accomplished and certainly not the richest.  But I do solid work.  I’m proud of what I do.  I’m proud of what I’ve learned and what we do together in our business.  It’s taken 4 years of hard, hard work. I’m not throwing it away and I’m not backing down from the commitment I made to my husband that we would be in this business together.

However, that doesn’t mean it’s always easy and that life’s circumstances don’t sometimes get in the way.  This year, our business suffered a heart attack.  In March, a major client fired their VP without warning and put everything on hold for 6 months.  Without warning.  Our other clients all went quiet at virtually the same time; something that has never happened before and wasn’t predictable.  Everyone was happy with us, with our work and our relationship with them but they just didn’t have anything for us.  (As an aside, no one got mad because of something we did or said and we haven’t done anything to sabotage our business.  Every client relationship is in tact and in good standing.  Anything said to the contrary is blatantly false and speculative, thank you very much.)

The summer months were scary.  The phone didn’t ring and we called and called and called and sent letters and called again. We overhauled our website and called some more prospects.  We prayed a lot.  We (I) cried a lot.  We sought help for anxiety and depression.  We kept praying, kept encouraging each other, tried to hope beyond hope that the log jam was going to break apart soon.

And then my dog died.

It wasn’t until September that things started to turn.  The recovery continues and much like recovering from a major heart attack, it takes time to regain strength.  Does that mean we should throw away everything and just be done?  Not a chance and we won’t until we have nothing left to fight for.  We have no reason to believe our business will not be busy and thriving in 2014 and that a year from now, this episode will be part of our history.

All of this is to give some perspective to our journey.  It’s not as simple as it appears from the outside (Is it ever?) and the solution is not going back to a career that is now a part of my past.   So when you see us, please give us some encouragement and remind us that you love us.  It’s been a rough year and we’re fragile.  Handle with care.

Some birds are not meant to be caged, that’s all. Their feathers are too bright, their songs too sweet and wild. So you let them go, or when you open the cage to feed them they somehow fly out past you. And the part of you that knows it was wrong to imprison them in the first place rejoices, but still, the place where you live is that much more drab and empty for their departure.

-Stephen King