The past few days have not been spacious ones.
They’ve been full of productivity. The draining kind. The non-stop from morning to evening kind. Every moment of each day is poured into chasing an invisible clock, which determines a varying salary amount.
It’s exhausting.
It feels like so much of my time has been corroded by the need to earn a living, only to result in enough to barely scrape by. I’m so tired of calculating how many hours I need to push through just to survive.
As a freelancer, this is (unfortunately) part of what you sign up for—a constant hustle. But what I didn’t sign up for is reducing every minute to a monetary value that’s only realised once you finish that minute and move on to the next one.
I feel pulled in so many directions every day, trying to figure out what to prioritise and what deserves more attention than the rest.
I celebrate each hour that’s clocked because it means I’ll gain something at the end of the month.
I mostly love what I do. It excites me and pushes me to grow and learn continuously, but it’s also suffocating and void of spaciousness.
Yet somewhere within this relentless rhythm, I’m learning something about the relationship between survival and creativity, between necessity and passion.
The very tension that exhausts me also reveals what matters most—those moments when the work transcends the clock, when creativity breaks free from its monetary prison.
Perhaps the goal isn’t to escape this reality, but to find small pockets of spaciousness within it, where the work serves something larger than the next billable hour.
