The Devil's in the Money

I am wondering how long this is going to go on.

In the wondering, there are springs of anxiousness, like the daffodils reaching up through the garden outside (only to be eaten by Newfy, something of which I'm yet to break to my parents) - individually nothing to worry about, these tiny exclamations of spring in the mild midwinter, but together prophesising the beginning of some apocalyptic global warming phenomenon, while we mutter within ourselves, not too loud unless it might be true, that these environmental factors may, just may, have had something vaguely to do with our presence (guess who’s just watched An Inconvenient Truth).

Anxiousness displays itself through a muscle contraction around my stomach (not that you’d really notice, I’ve been trying to pretend it is an effective replacement for my gym abandonment), a sickness swooping down my throat into my gut, headaches grabbing my temples and squeezing them so gently yet so firmly that it is difficult to pinpoint.

I have these ideas exploding from my brain like cheap fireworks, often firing at random into someone else’s garden or fizzing un-climatically to the ground. Ways to make money, ways to live my life in the idealistic fashion I thought was granted to you on receiving your degree certificate (which are rarely the same idea). Ways to be the person I want to be.

I have never used the words ‘sell out’, because I never really thought I was making enough money to sell out. That word, I imagined, was reserved for the big boys, the stuff of The City, where Christmas bonuses could buy a small Eastern European country. My Christmas bonus, while much appreciated and meaning that I didn’t have to sell my already overly-mortgaged kidneys to pay my tax bill, would barely have covered the air fare (and perhaps a cheap night’s b&b on arrival if I did a bit of scouring).

I have used the words ‘corporate whore’ many times, probably more because I quite like it. It conjures up images of The WebStress donning a fetching PVC catsuit (well, to me anyway, but you may not want to dwell too much on that thought) to derive and unsettling amount of pleasure out of creating pointless banner ads and re-editing already butchered designs back to how they originally were when you submitted them to the client, after undergoing major surgery by someone clearly on work experience.

What am I? I am good at my job. Or, rather, I am good at every part of my job, other than the actual designing bit, but I reckon I can argue a good case for my CSS, unless someone is actually looking at the actual sloppily written and ill conceived code.

Not only that, I am good at my job, which allows me to have the lifestyle I have become so wonderfully accustomed to.

Still not quite right?

Yorkshire Lass, a very good friend of mine, suffering a similar career crisis, echoed my thoughts even before I really knew I’d had them, “I feel privileged to have a job that many other people would be eternally grateful for: my job is amazing, but I feel someone else would appreciate it more than me.”

That’s it. THAT’S IT.

I don’t appreciate my work, but I never thought I’d have to. All my web design jobs have had flaws so sizeable its almost impossible to claw out of them to get on with something productive.

But with this job, all of those flaws are being slowly irradiated by the wonderful staff that I work with. Don’t like 9 to 6? We don’t either, here’s an 8 hour day, and oh we’ll throw in an hour’s lunch break. And nag you if you don’t use it. Been working overtime? Why not finish early on a Friday. Too much overtime? Okay, no worries, we’ll pay you. So you want to start earlier? Just work the hours you like. You want to take a few hours off? How’s about you just make it up rather than take it as holiday. And we’ll be really lovely about the whole thing. Hate London? Work from home. And you can keep your London salary, and what the hell we’ll throw in a Christmas bonus.

My job is becoming increasingly hard to dislike, certainly from everyone else’s perspective.

I have created such an undercurrent of processes inherent to my actually being in my role that boss #1, soon to arrive in the UK, will find it difficult to gazump my job with some heavily qualified, paid-a-considerable-amount-more-than-me design guru and demote me to being whatever they think I do at the moment. I didn’t do this deliberately, not really, but the cogs are beginning to turn, and I’m one of them (the one that needs a bit of oiling and tends to break down erratically).

I am still here, I am still working, I am still a web designer.

There were empty, hollow promises. I would abandon my job and write. Oh I so wanted to, I ached to. It was now or never, I knew that, my boyfriend in New Zealand, being back home, little rent to pay. Then, okay, I’ll do some casual work to pay the bills and to save up some money. And, oh bugger, now I have a car to pay for. Now my boyfriend is home, thank god, something I hope I will never take for granted, not after 2006, not after that time without him, but we have loans to pay and a house to find.

There are two ways people start their own businesses or break out to follow their creative dreams as far as I have been able to deduce.

#1 – Give up work.

This is of course the favoured option, for a completely immersive experience, to dedicate your very lifeblood to following your dreams, your ambitions. But it comes with oh such a risk. And can only be done realistically either by taking a loan from the bank, only advised for business propositions which will actually make money (The WebStress Writes doesn’t really conjure visions of writhing around in bucket loads of cash), or through being supported financially. And at the moment, I am the one who will be paying the mortgage while my boyfriend battles with fierce loan repayments.

#2 – Start your dream alongside your day job.

Everyone says it. You are creating hollow excuses for yourself, you can start today, now, with a pen and paper. All the excuses in the world, that I feel have such a severe hold on me, don’t wash with The Big Guys.

I was getting there, somewhere at least, with a business plan. But things have halted, through no-one’s fault, and no diving board can be approached while we are agreeing a mortgage, it is my wage we are hanging tentatively off. But in developing ideas I was up at six, finishing late in the evening, squeezing every moment out of the day, barely recognising my boyfriend, barely attending my beautiful Newfy, encased within a smoke of ideas and being cholked on not being able to achieve them, no time, not enough time. And then I collapsed.

Apart from a brief period, ironically when I was running a business with a friend, ever since I left uni I have worked way beyond my typical hours, way beyond what is considered to be a day job. Just with the job itself, or with the freelance work I use as the frills on my financial grouting.

And then, before then, where university work had no boundaries, where it spread like a virus into the mornings and evenings and weekends. And, back, back further, to A-levels, where coursework was molded around part time jobs.

I have become to resent ‘extra curricular’ work in such an unproductive way I am continuously disappointed with myself. And when I do drag my tired eyes and my aching head back to the computer on an evening, there is always something, something that needs attending to that involves a client, some nominal amount of money, something that needs to be completed now, and your dream can just be placed, just there, just out of reach, until tomorrow.

And there are the things I love, my boyfriend, my Newfy, sat within arm's reach, sat so near to me and I wonder what the hell I am doing. Too often I have neglected him, my boyfriend, the person who has come home and attended me with cups of tea, with soothing words, and is often repaid with a shadow of his girlfriend, or harsh words, or tears, from exhaustion, from frustration, from such an aching head.

When I do grab such a few precious, coveted hours and productivity does spurt from my usually cauterized veins, it is never enough, and I reflect my achievement on completion, feeling let down, the words not being quite right, the story feeling half-baked and unloved now, now there’s no time to attend to it.

My impatience and my disappointment in my own achievements burrows so many holes within myself that I am often ashamed of even admitting my flaws, for worry other people will then spot these great gapes of imperfection and not be able to look at me.

I am tired of my own overused, exhausted excuses.