The Inbox

I answer client emails at midnight in bed with one eye open and the other watching the battery percentage like it’s a countdown to something I can’t afford.

This is what they don’t show you about being self-employed. Not the LinkedIn version. Not the “I left my 9-5 and now I work in my pyjamas” version. The actual version. Where the pyjamas are the same ones you’ve been wearing since Tuesday and the laptop is balanced on a pillow and the email you’re writing is worth three hundred pounds which is exactly the gap between the rent being covered and the rent not being covered.

I don’t have office hours. I have awake hours. Which is most of them. The business doesn’t stop because the children need bedtime stories. The clients don’t pause because I’m having a breakdown in the tinned tomatoes aisle. The invoices don’t send themselves and the websites don’t build themselves and the proposals don’t write themselves and none of it, none of it, stops because I’m tired.

I’m always tired.

But tired and alive is better than rested and controlled. That’s the trade I made. That’s the exchange rate of freedom. You get your life back and the cost is your sleep and your sanity and your evenings and your weekends and the concept of a day off, which is something that exists in other people’s lives like a foreign country I’ve heard about but never visited.

I taught myself to code at nineteen. Built my first website before I could legally drink. I’ve been doing this for twenty years. Twenty years of skills and experience and a brain that can solve problems other people charge thousands for.

And for thirteen of those years someone else took the credit. Controlled the income. Decided what I was worth. Made me believe I couldn’t do it without him.

I’m doing it without him. Every email. Every invoice. Every late-night proposal. Every website I build from a kitchen table in Lancashire after bedtime. All without him.

The battery is at 4%.

The email is sent.

The rent will be covered.

And tomorrow I’ll do it all again. Because this is mine. Every tired, midnight, one-eye-open, pyjama-wearing bit of it.

Mine.