100 days of working for myself: everything nobody claps for
On the applause that arrives on the day you need it least.
Hi, I’m Katie. Welcome to The Multiple Lives Theory, where I write for people who have outgrown a version of a life they worked hard to build. Essays from inside the transition, weekly.
A hundred days today, which I only noticed because of a calendar reminder I set in May and forgot about.
Today is day one hundred.
Nobody is going to mention it, which is completely fine, and which is also the thing I want to write about.
When I announced it, people were lovely. Messages, comments, a couple of phone calls from people who don’t phone. Genuinely warm, all of it, and I reread some of them for longer than I would like to admit in writing.
That lasted about two days. Then everybody went back to their own lives, correctly, and I got on with mine. The distance between those two experiences is most of what I have learned in three months.
The support arrives on the wrong day
A decision is easy to see. It happens on one day, it gets announced, it has a shape, and there is an obvious thing to say about it. Good luck. So brave. Well done you.
The work afterwards is invisible. It is slow, it is incremental, there is no moment in it, and there is nothing for anyone to react to. Nobody is going to message you on day fifty-two, because nothing happened on day fifty-two, and the only person who knows that is you.
So all of the encouragement lands in one place, and it is the wrong place.
You get all of the encouragement on the day you need none of it, and none of it on the days you would have used it.
On day one you are running on adrenaline and certainty and a slightly manic sense of having finally done the thing. You could not need less support.
By day forty you are neither of those things, and there is nobody there, because forty is not a number anybody marks.
Everything nobody claps for
Here is a partial list, from the last hundred days.
Sending the invoice.
Following up on the invoice.
Following up on the invoice again, with a different subject line, trying to sound relaxed about it.
Going through social media engagement
Rewriting the same page four times and publishing the second version.
Saying no to work I could have done, for money I could have used.
Reading a contract properly, all of it, including the part at the end.
Starting on a new creative brief.
Auditing my week
Working out the tax thing. Then working out the other tax thing.
A whole day where nothing happened and I sat there anyway.
Not checking whether anyone from the old place had noticed.
Checking my inbox.
Getting to Friday with no measurable outcome except that I hadn’t stopped.
Deciding, somewhere around day forty-one, not to go back, and telling nobody I had been considering it.
None of that is a milestone. All of it is part of the job.
The part I didn’t expect to mind
I thought I left for autonomy, and I did.
I would make the same call again tomorrow. What I hadn’t understood is how much of the old job was other people watching me do it.
Not praise. I was never especially fussed about praise. Just witnesses. Somebody who knew roughly what I had worked on that week.
A person who would notice if I disappeared for a day, and might send a message about it.
The ambient sense of being observed doing something, which I found irritating at the time and apparently was also using as a scaffold.
I got rid of all of that deliberately and then missed it, which is an embarrassing thing to write down. I have rewritten this paragraph four times trying to make it sound less needy. It still sounds needy. I’m leaving it in.
Although I want to be careful here, because this is very close to complaining about something I asked for. I chose this. The version before it was worse and I have not forgotten how that felt.
And I’m not sure I trust the feeling entirely. Some of wanting witnesses is just wanting a manager. Which is a strange thing to miss and not obviously a healthy one.
There is a version of this where I am describing a genuine structural problem with working alone, and a version where I am describing a habit I have not finished breaking.
What I can’t tell yet is whether it eases once the work gets bigger?
Or whether this is simply what working for yourself is and everybody who does it stops mentioning it after the first year.
What I’d put in the announcement post
Definitely not advice. But if I could go back and add two lines to the day one version of this, it would be these.
The applause is for the decision, and the decision was the easy part.
Budget for doing the hard part with nobody watching, because that is the actual arrangement and it starts on day three.
And find the smallest possible way to have your week witnessed by somebody.
A friend who asks on Fridays, a group chat, a standing coffee, anything with a person in it.
Not accountability. I have never got on with accountability, it turns your own week into homework and somebody else into a supervisor.
I mean something much smaller than that. Just that the week gets said out loud to another person before it disappears, so that it existed somewhere other than inside my own head.
Day one hundred looks like a Sunday. I’ll do some admin, I’ll finish this, I’ll send it, and tomorrow will look a lot like today.
The one thing that has changed is that some of the week gets written down now, and it goes out to a couple of thousand inboxes, which is not the same as a colleague noticing and turns out to be close enough to do the job.
I don’t know what day two hundred looks like. Probably like this.
If you are somewhere in your own hundred and nobody is clapping, that isn’t a sign it is going badly. It is what it looks like from the inside.
That is the whole finding, and it isn’t much of one, but it is the true one and I would have liked somebody to tell me on day forty.
-Katie
What day are you on, and what’s the thing nobody clapped for?
If this landed, send it to somebody who is somewhere in their own hundred days.
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