When I first started freelancing—eight years ago, now—I had a state-of-the-art Sony Vaio laptop that weighed about seven pounds. (It’s okay, you can laugh. I don’t mind. It is pretty hilarious to think about, now.) I did most of my work on that laptop, in the beginning, and most often while sitting in my bed, late at night, after my kids had gone down for the night.

As time went on and it became clear that I was actually going to make a go of this freelancing thing, I moved to a desk in the corner of the family room. The kids could play and I could keep an eye on them and continue to work. Sort of. And once they were both in school I could work at the desk in blessed silence.

When I moved to Georgia five and a half years ago, I was excited to finally have a proper office. Oh, sure, my from-a-kit desk didn’t fare too well on the move—the hutch bowed in the center and was never quite right again—and I was sharing the space with my new husband, but still. An office! Like a grown-up! This was the start of a new chapter for me, both personally and professionally, and I felt rather heady with the possibilities.

And then, of course, life set back in.
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My strength is writing, not math; this is why I have an accountant. It didn’t take long for me to figure out that the key to running my own business was going to be figuring out who I needed to help me. So, back to my accountant: he is very patient with me. Some aspects of bookkeeping and payroll taxes and such I’ve picked up easily, and other things involve him trying really hard not to laugh at me as I sit in his office, asking for the umpteenth time which form it is he needs me to fill out on the state treasury site. (I am a fun client to have, I bet. Ha.)

Anyway, one of the things I didn’t have that much trouble digesting as I came into this world of business taxes is that certain expenditures are deductible, and that’s a good thing. I keep meticulous records, now, after my first few years being a little less, shall we say, stringent. (”I bought some stuff for my office. That’s deductible, right? … receipts? I… hmmm.”) It’s all good now.

And this is a very long prelude to admitting that I got a shiny new iPhone 5 this week. Not because I always want or have to have the latest-and-greatest (I was upgrading from an iPhone 4, not a 4S, because when those came around I kind of shrugged and said, “Yeah, I’m good”), but because periodically it makes good business sense. This year has been dismal, financially, and so it turned out that this month was a great time to spend some money. No, really.
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It’s the most wonderful time of the year! I mean, I assume it is for someone. Most people I know actually get pretty stressed out about the holidays—contrary to the “peace, love, and good cheer” hype—but when you work in a field that makes December one of your busiest months, it can sometimes feel like everyone else is getting ready for a party while you’re chained to your desk. (Pity party, table of one, please.)

December is always a hard month for me, work-wise. I work longer hours than usual, at just the time when I would rather be with my family. This particular December, I am really struggling. Due to multiple work hiatuses this year, this is really my kick-it-into-gear last chance to get some solid income in before the year’s end. We’re not traveling this year, which is both a relief (because the only thing worse than working through the holidays is working through the holidays while traveling) and a disappointment. My daughter is coming home for her first visit since moving in with her father, and that is wonderful, but I don’t want to feel like I have to work-work-work while she’s here.

Basically I am out of sorts in every possible way. But I’m going to take a page from my son’s playbook to try to get myself back into the right frame of mind.
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When I worked in an office, I had colleagues. Coworkers. I had people I reported to and people with whom I collaborated and people who reported to me. There were good things about this and not-so-good things, and one of the things I enjoy about freelancing is that I more or less get to stand on my own merit in this job.

Let’s face it: everyone’s had a crazy boss or an offensive coworker or some other incarnation of a difficult office relationship, right? For me, the downside of losing regular social interaction and project help was vastly outweighed by removing the variables of Other People’s Stupid from my daily work life.

Now, for the most part, I get to pick my colleagues. And my work is diversified enough that if I find myself in a bad situation with someone—they are not as competent as I’d originally thought, or just grate on my nerves or whatever—I can extract myself from gigs if I don’t want to work with a particular individual and it doesn’t put me in a difficult spot. (I don’t know about you, but when I worked office jobs, I didn’t really have the freedom to just up and quit every time someone annoyed me.)
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[This image courtesy of Shenkitup.com, and isn't actually a picture of me. But it may as well be.]

I am, as many writers are, an introvert. But I also, as many such writers do, integrate a fair amount of being-in-public-as-part-of-work types of activities into my schedule. So I can certainly put on my Public Face (and/or my big girl panties) and interact with strangers in socially acceptable ways. It may not be the most natural thing in the world for me, but I’ve had a lot of practice and when I head to a conference, for example, I know how to balance my experience so that I have enough time to recharge and can be my best self in public.

Recently I was going about my day—actually I was at physical therapy—and someone recognized me from my personal blog. It turned out to be kind of a funny encounter, and the woman who approached me was lovely, but (as I ended up sharing on the blog) I felt very awkward at first. It caught me off guard, being recognized locally, while doing nothing more than just going about my mundane life.

And then I felt like a giant cliche.
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Part of the reason I wanted to freelance instead of working a “regular” job was so that I could be more available for my kids, and my schedule more flexible. So it’s at times like this I remind myself that this is exactly what I wanted.

See, right now I’m in a cabin. In the mountains. With my son’s school! Or, at least, many of the children from my son’s school. Many lovely, delightful, oh-my-gosh-so-very-loud children from my son’s school. We are on an extended field trip and I’m sure it’s going to be lots of fun… even if I cannot hear myself think, at the moment.

But it’s okay, because I have my computer, and my wireless modem, and even though I’m theoretically helping to shepherd way too many kids as they run around in circles and scream at the top of their lungs (I’m sure it’s educational, somehow), I’m also managing to sneak away to do a little bit of work.
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When I first started blogging—you know, back when dinosaurs roamed the earth (haha)—marketing and PR professionals were seen as visionaries if they bothered pitching to bloggers or approaching them at all. I’m rounding the corner to my ninth year of a public online existence; that’s, like, a century in Internet years, or something. Back in the beginning, no one noticed me. And then, for a while, I would get maybe one weird email a month, then one a week, and I remember thinking it was becoming A Thing when I started getting one or two a day.

If you’re doubled over with laughter, reading that, it’s okay. I understand. Nowadays—between the couple of email addresses I use most frequently—it’s not unusual for me to receive upwards of 200-300 emails per day which I consider spam, and that’s just the ones that aren’t caught by the spam filter. There’s probably 50-100 emails each day which I truly care about, too. And then blog comments (all of which arrive as emails from WordPress). My point is, I get a lot of email.

And? My mother raised me to be polite. So ever-increasingly, I find myself in somewhat of a conundrum, stuck between what I consider acceptable behavior and the constraints of time, reality, and trying to have a life.
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For years I have taken for granted having a career in which I can work from anywhere, at any time. Have laptop, will write! I have worked through the flu, through childcare crises, when my car was broken down, during blizzards, and through various and sundry physical ailments (at various degrees of misery, but I could still work). What a blessing, I have always thought, to have a job that did not depends on too many external factors. My husband has a recurrent foot ailment which often makes his long days of teaching (on his feet at the front of the classroom) extremely difficult. If there was something wrong with my foot, I would simply prop it up on the couch and keep typing.

But this month I have finally learned what it would take to make my job very, very difficult: Last week, I broke my hand. On the plus side, I broke my left hand, and I am right-handed. On the minus side, I broke my hand. I had to have surgery, and I am not expected to be back to full mobility for another six weeks at least. Even overlooking the pain and discomfort associated with my injury, I spend my days typing. I spend my days touch typing, with two hands. One of my hands is currently in a splint. Things have changed.
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Once upon a time I was a productive member of society.

Oh, it’s not that I’m not, now. I contribute what I hope is some useful stuff to the world around me, in various ways. But what I mean is that I went to school for years and years and raised my hand to speak and did group projects with other students and I met deadlines and ran meetings and then went out into the “real world.” There I no longer had to raise my voice to speak, but I did have to do things like put a professional greeting on my voicemail and do things like “follow the chain of command” and be in the office at a certain point every morning and stay until a certain point each evening. I’ve worked in a cube and I’ve had officemates and I’ve had my own office. But all of those were still under the watchful eye of various bosses and assorted colleagues.

For all of the things that freelancing from my home office has given me, I sometimes wonder if it hasn’t rendered me completely incapable of returning to a “regular” job without being fired. Mind you, I have zero desire to go back to that sort of job, but who knows? It’s weird to think about.
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Last week I saw about twenty different people link to this post on Penelope Trunk’s blog about mentoring and so of course I went and read it. And then I was confused. Because I was expecting kind of a how-to about mentoring, and that wasn’t exactly what it was. But Cassie Boorn (the writer) did drop this interesting gem at the end:

This is the part where I give you career advice. You can’t hide who you are and make genuine connections at work. Eventually it comes out and you make everyone around you feel like they have been duped. If you want a great career you have to have a good network and you have to have good mentors and people can’t mentor you and be your network if they don’t know you.

I suspect that’s why everyone is lauding this as a must-read piece, even though the mentoring relationship described in the article is perhaps a somewhat unconventional one. I also suspect this is part of why this piece bothers me so, because I would hate for someone who’s never experienced good mentoring to read Boorn’s words and conclude that her relationship with Trunk is the only way mentoring can or should work, which I don’t think is really true. And finally, I’m not entirely sure I even agree with the conclusion.
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