The anxious underbelly of solo work

on returning and working

I’ve been ignoring my Substack homepage for a few weeks in an attempt to avoid seeing how long ago it was since I last posted. Disappointingly, the duration has continued to grow.

I always find it doubly painful to return to sharing after dropping out of a self-imposed routine. The doubt seeps in, writing the next post feels gargantuan and the burden of justification for time away feels like summing up a complex legal case.

Another part of not writing to you sooner is that these two months have careened in all kinds of directions I didn’t expect and I don’t entirely know what’s next. (Note to self: this is living.)

After talking about the return of high anxiety and low mood in my last post, I did something different: I started telling people about it. (In addition to broadcasting it to the Internet…)

I went back to basics and re-centred my life around meeting anxiety. I went to the doctor—all good, no physical cause of fatigue. “Most of the time, this kind of fatigue comes about through chronically elevated cortisol.” In other words, it’s the anxiety, stoopid. I feel a sense of trembling awe when I remember what anxiety alone can inflict on a life.

I realised how much anxiety has been a common thread through all the internal turmoil I’ve experienced over the last 5 or so years: the burnout, the creative struggles, the low mood, the doubt. It was always there and perhaps it played a much bigger role than I realised. This makes sense: the anxiety preceded it all. It’s almost 10 years to the day that I had a panic attack out of the blue.

It might sound glum but confronting, again, the searing power of anxiety has been a relief. Before, I had 30 seemingly separate issues, all needing bespoke solutions. Now I have a singular, if uncomfortable realisation—I am struggling with anxiety. And by tackling the anxiety head-on, leaning into it and challenging it each day, all kinds of disparate dilemmas start evaporating.

I started considering full-time work again. This began in The Summer (RIP), but I initially felt guilty for “turning my back on my dreams” or a variety of other scathing judgements. I nervously told people I was considering going back to work, wondering how they’d react. Usually with a nod, a smile and encouragement. Ok then.

I realised that going out on your own—in my case, a mix of coaching, consultancy and writing—had been exhausting and perhaps a major catalyst for this new wave of anxiety. I consciously made this trade-off but I underestimated it.

You are living the dream: choosing what to work on, shaping your own routine, and living by your own standards. But you also have to choose what to work on, shape your own routine, and live subject to your own standards.

Some days it was exhilarating and others like swimming through brambles. More uncomfortable realisations: I missed the structure of a day job. Having priorities, a regular cadence, and daily feedback. I missed being a part of a team. I missed the camaraderie, the shared adventure, even if it included the shared suffering as part of the package.

Compare this to the open-endedness of finding people to coach on the Internet; writing about 1 of a million things you want to write about, in 1 of the 10 different formats you might share it, and on 1 of 100 different platforms you might broadcast it. And then finally offering it to a small, largely silent, audience. And doing it all alone with little feedback. I was not prepared for the loneliness. Throw in some perfectionism and you have all the ingredients for a self-imposed meltdown.

For years, I harboured the delusion that lack of free time was what was holding me back from becoming an author, solo creative and living the dream life. If only all this boring work was out of the way, I'd seamlessly segue into my best creative self. But, as millions learned through the paid furloughs of COVID-19, being released from one constraint is no guarantee of success in others. I didn't write a book. Or the shorter guides that were supposed to release me from the burden of writing a book. I didn't pen the series of writings I was so excited about. I didn't do a lot of things and it wasn’t for lack of trying. It was just really hard.

I’d prematurely consigned Dan the Tech Leader to the past on account of the burnout experienced in that line of work. But through consultancy and tinkering with personal projects, I found that everything that energises me about this work is still there, still alive, still a part of me.

Buying a house has also been on my mind for some time; a growing desire for stability and an increasing distaste for any kind of relationship with a landlord or estate agent. Getting a mortgage whilst being self-employed is possible, but it extends the runway by several years and even then there’s no guarantee.

I am lucky with my current rental, despite it requiring a second mortgage to heat, on account of its old, tall walls. But it’s not enough to offset the dream of having a place that I can make my own, out of the city, and not subject to random inspections by someone I barely know. Unlike Tom, I am lucky/depraved enough to have a job in computer coding, so there is some pathway to making this happen.

I still love coaching and I’m still working with people on a more limited, picky basis. I’m grateful I took the time to train while I could. Besides the joy of coaching others, it has also changed the way I relate to my own motivation. I'm not leaving it behind but I’m also not in a mad rush to suddenly turn everything around and drag myself kicking and weeping into my dream life.

It’s easier to see now how rigid my expectations were. It seems laughable that I would have nailed a totally new lifestyle on my first attempt, and that it would accommodate every part of my life from here on out. I have plenty of time. I probably won’t get it right the first time or the fourth. Rather than the immutable work you’re destined to do, maybe there are just different ways of working for different epochs of life. It seems to me that the energy required to switch between them is not much more than a click of the fingers.

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The anxious flare-up and turn-around made me realise how often I return to perennial truths—whether in meditation (noticing change, recognising judgement) emotional wellbeing (noticing avoidance, meeting uncomfortable feelings) or writing (showing up, trusting the muse)—and how powerful it is to go back to basics.

It helped me see I saw what I’d been doing all my life with my note-taking and writing: leaving notes & reminders to myself, on what matters and how to engage it. That’s pretty much it in a nutshell. Return to these things, over and over, because they work magic, when you return to them, over and over.

All of this gave me a jolt of writing inspiration and I wondered how the burden of publishing might change if I were just sharing notes for myself. More on that soon.

Photo by NEOM on Unsplash